http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2 ... X1K0000532
AMD and Seagate will demonstrate a next-generation 6-Gbit/s SATA interface Monday in New Orleans, the companies said.
Neither company is announcing products based on the technology yet, Seagate executives said. The 6-Gbit/s SATA technology will be part of a future AMD south bridge chip, and may appear in solid-state-disc drives before it becomes part of a conventional hard drive.
The target markets will be gaming PCs and servers, executives said.
Currently, SATA uses a 3.0-Gbit/s interface, which should satisfy the throughput requirements of hard drives until 2011, when that channel will become saturated and the 6.0-Gbit/s interface will truly be needed. But the SATA-IO Working Group and the industry has traditionally built in enough overhead into the interface to allow the industry time to prepare, said Marc Noblitt, senior marketing I/O development manager for Seagate.
On a rotating drive, the optimum location for storing data is on the outside tracks, where the throughput is highest as the disk spins. But that data rate will reach 250 Mbytes/s in 2011, saturating the current 3-Gbits/s channel. "You always want to keep the I/O spec in front of the data rate to ensure you don't run up against it," Noblitt said.
