Seagate Unveils 6Gb/s SATA HDD for Unmatched Improvement on Streaming and Data Transfers

Seagate, teamed with AMD unveiled Serial ATA 6Gigabit/second – for bandwidth-hungry desktop and laptop PC applications including gaming, streaming video and graphics multimedia at the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans this week. The Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second storage interface will deliver the highest performance – burst speeds of up to 6Gigabits per second – for all PC applications. The best thing is that despite this big improvement, they will use the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration. Native Command Queuing, the intelligent technique they use to increase the overall system performance and data transfer speed keeping in mind the applications which take up heavily transactional work-loads, has been improved immensely.

The Seagate and AMD demonstration features two Seagate SATA disk drives –

• one a shipping Barracuda® 7200.12 3Gb/second hard drive
• The other a prototype Barracuda 6Gb/second drive – in a desktop PC to show the performance difference between the two generations.
• The PC is powered by an AMD prototype SATA 6Gb/second chipset.
• The Seagate SATA 3Gb/second drive runs at more than 2.5Gigabits per second and the SATA 6Gb/second drive at 5.5Gigabits per second
• Moreover, performance of each storage interface is displayed on the PC monitor.

The 6Gb/second Serial ATA (SATA) is currently available in two speeds – 3Gb/second and 1.5Gb/second.

The increasing reliance of consumers and businesses worldwide on digital information is giving rise to gaming, digital video and audio, streaming video, graphics and other applications that require even more bandwidth, driving demand for PC interfaces that can carry even more digital content, The SATA 6Gb/second storage interface will meet this demand for higher-bandwidth PCs. Seagate has a long history of being first to market with new technologies such as Serial ATA, perpendicular recording and self-encrypting drives, and is pleased to be teaming with AMD to stage the world’s first public demonstration of SATA 6Gb/second storage.

said Joan Motsinger, Seagate vice president of Personal Systems Marketing and Strategy.

[Source: Seagate press release]