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Seagate and AMD To Demo 6 Gbps SATA Interface

PostPosted: Wed Mar 04, 2009 11:37 am
by Ian
According to Extremetech, Seagate and AMD will be demonstrating a 6 Gbps SATA interface on Monday. I can't say that my SATA 3 Gbps drives are "slow" but at least they're looking to the future.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2 ... X1K0000532

AMD and Seagate will demonstrate a next-generation 6-Gbit/s SATA interface Monday in New Orleans, the companies said.

Neither company is announcing products based on the technology yet, Seagate executives said. The 6-Gbit/s SATA technology will be part of a future AMD south bridge chip, and may appear in solid-state-disc drives before it becomes part of a conventional hard drive.

The target markets will be gaming PCs and servers, executives said.

Currently, SATA uses a 3.0-Gbit/s interface, which should satisfy the throughput requirements of hard drives until 2011, when that channel will become saturated and the 6.0-Gbit/s interface will truly be needed. But the SATA-IO Working Group and the industry has traditionally built in enough overhead into the interface to allow the industry time to prepare, said Marc Noblitt, senior marketing I/O development manager for Seagate.

On a rotating drive, the optimum location for storing data is on the outside tracks, where the throughput is highest as the disk spins. But that data rate will reach 250 Mbytes/s in 2011, saturating the current 3-Gbits/s channel. "You always want to keep the I/O spec in front of the data rate to ensure you don't run up against it," Noblitt said.