Seagate revs up 6Gbps serial ATA

March 12, 2009: The first public demonstration of next-generation high-speed data transfer – Serial ATA 6Gigabit/second – have been made by Seagate and AMD.

The demonstration featured two Seagate SATA disk drives – one a shipping Barracuda 7200.12 3Gb/second hard drive and 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, with the performance of each storage interface displayed on the PC monitor.

Serial ATA (SATA), the mainstream storage interface for desktop and notebook disk drives, is currently available in two speeds – 3Gb/second and 1.5Gb/second. SATA 6Gb/second is designed to be backward compatible with SATA 3Gb/second connectors, cables and other hardware.

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