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SATA-IO releases SATA 3.0 specification

by Parm Mann on 28 May 2009, 15:08

Tags: SATA Hard Drives, Serial ATA International Organization

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The Serial ATA International Organisation (SATA-IO) has finalised and released revision 3.0 of the SATA specification, paving the way for transfer speeds of up to 6Gb/s - double that of the existing SATA 3Gb/s standard commonly known as SATA II.

SATA 6Gb/s was first presented as a draft specification in July 2008, and its final revision arrived yesterday with a number of enhancements including:

  • A new Native Command Queueing (NCQ) streaming command to enable isochronous data transfers for bandwidth-hungry audio and video applications
  • An NCQ Management feature that helps optimise performance by enabling host processing and management of outstanding NCQ commands
  • Improved power management capabilities
  • A small Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for more compact 1.8-inch storage devices
  • A connector designed to accommodate 7mm optical disk drives for thinner and lighter notebooks
  • Alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standard

Speeds of up to 6Gb/s may appear to be overkill when taking into account the performance of modern hard disk drives, but the improved transfer speeds should prove to be beneficial to modern flash-based storage solutions such as SSDs.

SATA 6Gb/s is backward compatible with SATA 3Gb/s, and we're expecting to see a range of supporting hardware at next week's COMPUTEX trade show.



HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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I don't think 6Gb/s seems overkill at all, in fact given the development rate of SSDs and near-linear scaling in RAID I can see it being maxed out by a modest RAID-0 array within a few years.
With port replication and enclosures, 6Gbps will probably be quite useful.
d032sh
I don't think 6Gb/s seems overkill at all, in fact given the development rate of SSDs and near-linear scaling in RAID I can see it being maxed out by a modest RAID-0 array within a few years.

RAID won't max it any more then a single disk would. Each port on a RAID controller with the new spec should max out of 6GB/s individually.