Seagate demos 6Gbps hard-drive transfer speed
The next generation of SATA hard drives offers twice the speed cap of the existing SATA2 interface.
(Credit: Seagate)In collaboration with AMD, Seagate announced Monday its demonstration of a new hard drive Serial ATA (SATA) interface, tentatively called SATA3, that offers speeds up to 6Gbps, or 600MBps.
(SATA3, or SATA 6Gb/second, was developed by the Serial ATA International Organization under the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specifications.)
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. However, it's important to note that because of software and hardware overhead, the actual speed of most SATA hard drives is still less than 200MBps.
The new interface will raise the ceiling of hard drive throughput speeds by 200 percent, and hopefully the actual transfer speed of hard drives will increase accordingly.
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.
Right now, SATA3 is still in the final phase of development 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.
According to Seagate, however, you can expect the first SATA3-based hard drive by the end of the year.
Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong. 
... or sometimes simplified as 1 G = 1000 M
Do some research and verify your facts, for heaven's sakes... before writing these blogs!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte
OTOH, making the inference that 1Gbp/s ~ 100MB/s is a fairly common approximation despite the 8 bits = 1 byte math, since there is usually some kind of protocol overhead that makes the actual throughput take more than 8 bits transferred per byte written.
Bottom line is that Seagate and AMD have *demonstrated* throughput for the next gen. SATA that doubles SATA II...which is *way cool*...It seems a bit mean to hold the author accountable for ambiguities that have existed in terminology since SATA I was released at 1.5 Gbp/s, er 150 MB/s, er...you get the point.
- by Moto7451 March 9, 2009 11:34 AM PDT
- Actually a gigabit follows the correct SI-style nomenclature. A Giga-bit is 10^9 bits instead of a gigabyte which is 1024^3. To (basically) convert to megabytes, divide by 8 therefor 1Gb = 125MB so the maximum theoretical output is 750MB/s. Because Serial ATA uses 8b/10b encoding (8bits of actual data for every 10 bits sent), the actual throughput maximum is 600MB/s (6000/8 * 8 / 10 or simply 6000/10). The author is correct, he just skipped all the in between math ;-).
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