eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
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.