Those of us in the business of keeping an eye on new technologies wonder why the buzz about SATA 6Gbit/sec. (a.k.a. Serial ATA Revision 3) hasn't been louder than it is.
SATA 6Gbit/sec. is the next-generation SATA specification and will double the speed of the current SATA standard (which is 3Gbit/sec.). The technology was first demonstrated by Seagate and AMD in March 2009, and is finally coming to market. So why haven't we heard more about it?
Even some hard drive manufacturers are being coy about the new specification. For example, a Western Digital representative, when asked about the company's 1TB SATA 6Gbit/sec. Caviar Black, said that Western Digital had not made a major announcement because SATA Revision 3 just represents an interface change.
Just an interface change? Yes, technically that's correct. SATA Revision 3's speed rating -- like all of the other SATA and Parallel ATA (PATA) ratings -- is actually a measurement of the speed at which data travels from the hard disk's onboard cache to the interface on your PC. It really has nothing to do with the speed of the drive itself.
So is this new SATA technology irrelevant? Not at all. One only has to imagine its use with drives having higher rotational speeds than the current 7,200 rpm (they get to the data more quickly); drives with larger onboard cache (that will hold more data in readiness for the interface to absorb); and even SSDs where none of the offsets of mechanical hard disks exist. It could significantly improve performance in all of those scenarios.
Even with the current crop of drives -- especially with those that have increased cache values of 64MB and up -- SATA 6Gbit/sec. should add some increase in burst speed and sequential reads or writes to contiguous disk sectors. These procedures maximize the continuous streaming of data that a faster interface speed can take advantage of.
To take full advantage of the technology, you'll also want a system with at least an Intel Core i5 processor (to make use of Intel's SATA 6Gbit/sec.-supporting X55 chip set), at least 4GB of memory and a decent graphics card.
No comments:
Post a Comment