SATA 3.0 Released Paving The Way To 6Gb/sec SATA Devices

By Wesley Roberts •  Updated: 05/27/09 •  2 min read

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has just released the new Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specification. With this new 3.0 specification, the path has been paved to enable future devices to transfer up to 6Gb/sec as well as provide enhancements to support multimedia applications.

Like other SATA specifications, the 3.0 specification is backward compatible with earlier SATA products and devices. This makes it easy for motherboard manufacturers to go ahead and upgrade to the new specification without having to worry about their customer’s legacy SATA devices. This should make adoption of the new specification fast, like previous adoptions to SATA 2.0 (or 3Gb/sec) technology.

Serial ATA Revision 3.0 Specification Features

* A new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command to enable isochronous data transfers for bandwidth-hungry audio and video applications
* An NCQ Management feature that helps optimize 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

SATA is one of the most popular data transfer technologies. SATA was first introduced in 2001 and since then over 1.1 billion SATA hard drives have been shipped. SATA technology is housed on 98 percent of internal hard drive shipments today.

“The SATA interface has developed into the de facto standard HDD interface in computing applications,” said John Rydning, IDC’s research director for hard disk drives. “The new SATA Revision 3.0 specification builds upon the current market success of SATA, and will help to solidify SATA as the predominant storage device interface technology for the foreseeable future.”

SATA-IO will have a booth set up at Computex Taipei on June 2-6th if you want to check out the new specification in action just swing by booth #H810 to see the latest SATA3 6Gb/s products. Seagate and AMD have already shown off 6Gb/sec devices this past March.

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