Seagate, AMD demo 6Gbps SATA storage

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 11 March 2009 05:09

Fed up with waiting for slooow disk transfers? Seagate and AMD have demonstrated Serial ATA 6Gb/s using prototype equipment at the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans.

SATA 6Gb/s is designed to be backward compatible with SATA 3Gb/s connectors, cables and other hardware, which should simplify its introduction.

The extra transfer speed is said to suit applications such as gaming and streaming video as well as scientific and technical work.

SATA-IO, the Serial ATA International Organization, has requested that the new standard is referred to as either "SATA 6Gb/s" or "SATA Revision 3.0", but not "SATA III or SATA 3.0"

The world's first public demonstration of SATA 6Gb/s storage took place at the Everything Channel Xchange Conference this week and involved a  prototype Barracuda 6Gb/sec drive and a prototype AMD chipset.

Where a production 3Gb/sec Barracuda delivered better than 2.5Gb/sec, the prototype 6Gb/sec unit pumped through 5.5Gb/sec.

In addition to greater bandwidth, SATA 6Gb/s incorporates improvements to Native Command Queuing for increased throughput.

What did the vendors have to say for themselves? See page 2.