In August of last year, the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) got us all hot and bothered when it introduced the SATA Revision 3.0 specification to double transfer speeds to 6Gbps. It’s taken until today, however, for that very specification to be completed and released.
Thankfully for those who love to relish in the past, the new spec is backward compatible with earlier SATA implementations, and for those looking forward to new innovations, you’ll appreciate the new streaming commands for isochronous data transfers between audio and video applications and the Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for more compact 1.8-inch storage devices. We’re told to expect SATA Revision 3.0 demonstrations next month at Computex, but who knows how long it’ll be before this stuff seeps into shipping products.
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In collaboration with AMD, Seagate announced Monday its demonstration of a new hard drive Serial ATA (SATA) interface, tentatively called SATA3, that offers speeds up to 6Gbps, or 600MBps.
The new interface will raise the ceiling of hard drive throughput speeds by 200 percent, and hopefully the actual transfer speed of hard drives will increase accordingly.
The new interface will be backward compatible with the existing SATA and SATA2 interfaces and share the same cables and connectors. SATA3 also enhances power efficiency and improves native command queuing, an inherent features of SATA standard, to increase overall system performance and data transfer speeds.
According to Seagate, this is still in final development stage, but you can expect the first SATA3-based hard drive by the end of the year
Tracy Jones-Harris computers 6Gbps, AMD, SATA, SATA3, Seagate