Seagate, AMD Demo 6-Gbps SATA
The two industry giants expect the new version of SATA to appeal to users of bandwidth-hungry applications, such as gaming, streaming video and graphics multimedia, said Marc Noblitt, senior marketing and I/O development manager at Seagate.
The technology was demonstrated at the Everything Channel XChange Conference, being held in New Orleans this week.
The newest version of SATA, when it becomes available to the market, will offer speeds of up to 6 Gbps while maintaining backward-compatibility with the current 3-Gbps and 1.5-Gbps SATA interfaces, Noblitt said.
The demonstration showed the increased power-management features of 6-Gbps SATA, as well as the improved Native Command Queuing SATA feature that increases overall system performance and data-transfer speeds, and allows for advanced streaming of data, Noblitt said.
The move to 6-Gbps SATA comes at a time when the storage interface could become a bottleneck to increased PC performance, Noblitt said. "As data rates increase, customers also need the I/O performance to increase or overall performance will fall significantly," he said.
The demonstration features a PC with an AMD CPU and motherboard running with a prototype 6-Gbps SATA chipset connected to two Seagate Barracuda drives, including an existing 3-Gbps drive and a prototype 6-Gbps drive, Noblitt said.
He said the storage industry can expect to see 6-Gbps SATA hard drives and controllers come to market in late 2009.
The new 6-Gbps SATA will initially target high-performance PCs, entry-level servers, streaming video and graphics multimedia, Noblitt said.
"We plan to target the channel with the new drives," he said. "We expect to see them going into the enthusiast market and the high-end client markets first."