Wednesday, January 7th 2009
6 Gbps SATA Drives Could Arrive as Early as Q2 2009
According to reports by TechConnect Magazine, the third generation of the SATA interface could be introduced as early as the second quarter of this year. The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), who have developed the technology, are expected to finalize specifications, with the launch of products sporting the new interface at the same time. The first backwards compatible drives to feature the new interface are expected to be solid state drives (SSD), followed by hard disk drives (HDD) shortly after. The main advancement is doubling the bandwidth from 3Gbps to 6Gbps, but until the official announcement of the final specifications are released, we will not know what further changes are in store.
Source:
TechConnect
32 Comments on 6 Gbps SATA Drives Could Arrive as Early as Q2 2009
3.0 Gbps is equal to 375 MB/s
SSDs have reached these speeds. BTW there may be improvements with the response time too.
HDDs, however, are barely struggling on the 1.5Gb/s SATA. Next gen HDDs will be within the current SSD read/write levels. I actually prefer a HDD to a SDD.
Within 2 years, its very obvious that SSD's will be outperforming SATA-II's 300MB/s limit, so if they release SATA-III this year it gives time for PC's to upgrade at the same rate as SSD's.
worry less about TODAYS SSD speeds and the interface they use, and instead realise that SSD speeds are increasing incredible fast compared to the interface they use.
SATA 1.5gb/s=2001
SATA 3.0gb/s=2005
SATA 6.0gb/s=2008
as you can see it takes a while for the transmission standard to evolve (although looks to be evolving faster).
SSD's have been around in various forms since the 1990's, with the military and specialist companies enjoying the cutting edge technology of the time compared to disk platter based drives.
compare the SATA spec evolution with the evolution of the SSD speeds. where in just the 1st two years (of "consumer" SSD's), where DELL, Apple and Asus were using them.
the 1st SSD's 2 years ago barely managed 50/25 (read/write).
today, regardless of price, we already have SINGLE (not raid) SSD's that can handle nearly 300Mb/s transfers!
the evolution of the drives is outpacing transfer mechanisms. it seems the tables have turned as for many years single hard drives never approached their interface limits.
this is why the SATA spec can't evolve fast enough for us.
it matters less that it seems to be overkill for TODAY's SSD's and is more about future proofing us. it will be another few years before the storage device interface spec evolves to accommodate us, and by then we can only imagine what speeds we'll be transferring.
Anywho, dan is definately right on single drives, except for SSD's. SSD's are definately already 250MB+, and reaching the limits of SATA-II
SSDs have already successfully gone past the 375MB/s barrier...
SATA is so slow right now compared to current generation SSDs (only 1 company currently has current gen SSDs, and thats Micron Technology, Intel is still last gen)
They have a current sustained write speed of over 600MB/s. Add another SSD (they are expandable) and get 1100-1200MB/s sustained Writes...
So, its coming in line with Micron's release date for their SSDs (1Q-2Q 09).
Hope ya'll enjoy your el-cheapo Intel SSDs. ;-) Slow pokes.