Seagate demos 6Gbps hard-drive transfer speed
Summary: In collaboration with AMD, Seagate announced today its demonstration of a new hard drive Serial ATA interface, tentatively called SATA3, that offers speeds up to 6Gbps, or 600MBps.Currently most consumer-grade computers use either the SATA or SATA2 interface that offers cap throughput speeds of 1.
In collaboration with AMD, Seagate announced today its demonstration of a new hard drive Serial ATA interface, tentatively called SATA3, that offers speeds up to 6Gbps, or 600MBps.
Currently most consumer-grade computers use either the SATA or SATA2 interface that offers cap throughput speeds of 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps, respectively, or 150MBps and 300MBps.
(Because of software and hardware overhead, the actual speed of most SATA hard drives is still less than 200MBps.)
The new interface will increase maximum hard drive throughput speeds by 200 percent. SATA3, or SATA 6GB/second, was developed by the Serial ATA International Organization under the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specifications.
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.
SATA3 is still in the final phase of development, however, and there aren't any actual products yet. AMD said it would fully support the technology with a revision of its current 750 chipset and future chipsets.
Seagate, on the other hand, says you can expect the first SATA3-based hard drive by the end of the year:
Seagate and AMD are the first to demonstrate a complete implementation of 6 Gb SATA today in New Orleans. 3 Gb/sec SATA is standard today. 6 Gb/sec interfaces will ship on products in late 2009, none too soon for industry needs.
Why should you care?
1. Storage device throughputs (disk drives and SSD) are approaching the 3 Gb/sec SATA speed limit. For disk drives, it’s important for the external interface to be faster than the storage device. Otherwise, drives start to skip revolutions when reading and writing data. Skipped revolutions are like a sputtering car engine: they slow things down even further.
2. Interface speeds aren’t keeping up with capacity. It’s taking longer and longer to fill and empty a SATA drive. Anything that can be done to speed up the flow is valuable. The drive is the bottleneck, as it should be (see 1. above). Still, the interface speed has to be there as well.
6 Gb/sec SATA will get here just in time for hardcore PC users and gamers.
Seagate senior marketing I/O development manager Marc Noblitt says it's coming sooner than you think:
"Flash will take advantage [of the new interface], in applicable markets, sooner than you think," Noblitt said. "Six-gig is a perfect interface. OEMs tell us that they want to have the same SATA interface for flash as for a 1.8-inch rotating drive, so they can swap in a drive for flash, or vice versa."
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Talkback
You mean it increases interface speed 100%
performance.
Secondly, this is the interface speed and NOT
the actual drive speed. You might be able to
hit these top speeds if you're talking data
from the hard drive cache. Typical hard drives
remain in the 800 Mbps range for actual spindle
performance. Never mind hitting 1.5 Gbps, 3
Gbps, or 6 Gbps. We're not even close to that.
The new interface is useful if you're splitting
a single SATA or SAS interface in to 4 or 8
drives, but VERY few people use interface
splitters since it's just as cheap or cheaper
just to buy the actual interface. Even Sun
Microsystems monster storage box doesn't use
splitters.
please show us a drive out today that can saturate a SATA II interface?
interface.. SATA III? maybe 2-5 years down the road it
might be useful, but today, this is completely useless..
until we get faster drives... why?
There are some drives that can saturate that interface
Add another drive.... yeah, it's saturated.
Now look at....
Transfer from platter or from buffer?
Frankly, the connection speed is pretty overkill, because the device itself is actually far slower.
If they want to impress me, they'll put buffers on the drives that are closer to a gigabyte rather than the miniscule MB sized buffers they put on them today.
have you even heard of port multiplication?
meant for Lerianis above nt
Just masking the real problem for disk makers
But with all that said, I hope that the new interface takes off and becomes mainstream. As the Seagate guy said, it will really help with SSD storage systems. I also hope it and low SDRAM prices will encourage more vendors to come out with RAM-based storage solutions. We bought a stack of Gigabyte i-Ram 4gb SSDs for our developers, really helped their productivity.
They don't mention Intel support, which is a big red flag.
... speeds up to 6Gbps, or 600MBps ...
Henri
Serial Link Overhead
1 Gb = 1024 Mb (2^10)
The math is in the details
bit vs Byte
Also, Intel is traditionally always behind the curve because they think they set the standard and nothing else matters.
Don't be silly!
According to Jason Perlow, nobody wants extreme PCs capable of using all that bandwidth anymore (http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9626). Anyone who installs powerful hardware is "retarded".
Of course, this is all said with "extreme" sarcasm. I am actually very happy to see this SATA3 development; it is long overdue.
Those using WD Velicorators today can stress the 3GB limit, but even if it's not reached completely, the Seagate folks did a good job of describing how the current limit can hurt performance.
Forget about Mech disks, SSD is *the* standard
That said , the SSDs on the other hand will be defacto in a few years time.