Disk storage maker Seagate Technology and microprocessor provider Advanced
Micro Devices March 9 staged the world's first public demonstration of
next-generation high-speed data transfer—Serial ATA at 6G bps—at the Everything
Channel XChange Conference in New Orleans.
The demonstration featured two Seagate SATA disk drives, one a Barracuda
7200.12 3G-bps hard drive and the other a prototype Barracuda 6G-bps drive—in a
desktop PC to show the performance difference between the two generations.
The PC was powered by an AMD prototype SATA
6G-bps chip set. The Seagate SATA 3G-bps drive ran at 288.55MB per second and
the SATA 6G-bps drive ran at 589.09MB per second, with the performance of each storage
interface displayed on the PC monitor.
ATA drives today generally operate at either 1.5G bps or 3G bps. The new
Seagate-AMD 6G-bps interface not only doubles
the best speed currently available but also features backward compatibility
with legacy 1.5 and 3.0 SATA interfaces, the companies said.
The speedy new interface will be particularly welcomed by users of
bandwidth-hungry desktop and laptop applications such as video gaming,
streaming video and graphics multimedia.
"We are simply trying to widen the freeway before the traffic jam gets too
intense," Marc Noblitt, Seagate senior marketing I/O development manager,
told eWEEK. "We projected a couple of years ago that the Serial ATA at 6G-bps speed would be needed for widespread use in 2011. We've done
a lot of the work in development, and we expect it will become a standard later
this year."
The SATA 6G-bps storage interface not only will maintain backward compatibility
with the SATA 3G-bps and SATA 1.5G-bps interfaces, it also can use the same
cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration.
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