AMD and Seagate discuss the new 6Gbps SATA Standard
by Gary Key on March 9, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Gary's First Looks
AMD and Seagate are teaming up today in New Orleans to demonstrate the next-generation Serial ATA specification. The new specification, SATA 6Gbps, will offer twice the disk-to-host bandwidth of the existing 3Gbps Serial ATA standard. Besides the improvement in bandwidth, SATA 6Gbps offers full backwards compatibility with the earlier 3Gbps and 1.5Gbps standards, including the same cable and connector specifications.
AMD and Seagate have worked extensively on fine-tuning data streaming characteristics and users should expect to see significant improvements in this area over current 3Gbps NCQ implementations with the new drives. In addition, the new power management scheme allows the platform to instantaneously power on and off the 6Gbps SATA interface, unlike the always-on power state in current SATA systems.
Current Serial ATA hard drives on the market have average transfer rates that peak around 120MB/s, but read transfers out of the drive buffer (cache) are already hitting 288MB/s. Current caches are at 32MB with a move to 64MB shortly that will place further pressure on the current standard. In fact, the drive (modified 7200.12 design) that Seagate will demonstrate today has read transfers out of the driver buffer hitting 589MB/s.
However, the big winner initially with the new 6Gbps standard will be flash-based drives. We already have SSD drives like the Intel X25-E hitting sustained read and write rates over 200MB/s with new drive designs coming late this year that will probably saturate the current 3Gbps interface. The first customers that Seagate and AMD plan to address with this new technology are enthusiasts, low-end server markets, and users who stream high definition videos or do intensive graphics multimedia work.
Seagate and AMD were adamant that today’s technology demonstration is not an official product launch. That will come later this year when AMD formally announces their next generation chipset featuring full support for the 6Gbps standard. Both companies told us that 6Gbps SATA products might arrive before the end of 2009 but nothing is officially in the pipeline as of now.
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ameatypie - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - link
See http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/basicnetworking...">http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/basicnetworking....That basically explains the difference between bits and bytes, and also why they are nessercery.
sidefx1979 - Monday, March 9, 2009 - link
The MB vs MiB issue has nothing to do with bits vs bytes; It refers to the difference between mega and mebi (i.e. decimal vs binary) prefixes for bytes and the confusion that arises when they're not used consistently... mostly because the binary prefixes weren't defined until relatively recently and so the decimal versions were used to mean 2 different things and still are in many places - such as hard drive specs.Targon - Monday, March 9, 2009 - link
As with any drive technology, there are two aspects to how well a drive can work. First, you have the physical system where the information is read off the media and into the memory on the drive, and then you have the transfer ability from the drive to the system.Now, while current drive technologies may be limited by the controller on the hard drive itself(the electronics on the hard drive), we also need to be worried that the push to improve the hard drives will be slowed down by latency in the electronics. By pushing the transition from 3Gb/second to 6Gb/second, it encourages hard drive manufacturers to improve things on the drive side.
Another way to look at it is that if there is a bandwidth limitation in transferring the data, there is very little motivation for companies to release faster products, since there is no way to show you have a better product than your competition. Why make a drive that has the internal ability to read/write at 6Gb/second when the interface to the computer is only 3Gb/second since people will not see the benefits?
The same applies to video cards, where if you are CPU limited, there is no benefit to a faster video card. There is a balance between all the components in a computer, so the key is to reduce or eliminate potential bottlenecks.
AMD has become something of a platform company over the years. When the people saw that CPU access to memory was being limited by going through the chipset, the memory controller was moved to the CPU. Now, AMD is addressing the need for data from the hard drive, and that is what this article was all about. In time, we will probably see AMD push for a better connection between the video card, CPU, and memory as a way to make an AMD platform a better choice for some people.
finalfan - Monday, March 9, 2009 - link
See http://www.sata-io.org/members.asp">http://www.sata-io.org/members.aspIt is just a demo from AMD and Seagate. AMD is not even a board member while Intel is which is writing the spec. The article gives too much credit to both companies which are apparently not leaders of today's industry.
Sahrin - Thursday, March 12, 2009 - link
Intel competes with Seagate, AMD does not. That's the explanation you're looking for.Also, and this is just speculation on my part, given the way Intel was behaving on release of USB3.0 design spec, I'm not surprised to find AMD is being more proactive about having their own standard ready. Intel may have the majority of the chipset market, but if all the other players use a single (incompatible) spec, it will have to be respected by manufacturers.
Targon - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - link
Isn't the term leader supposed to indicate who is actually leading the way? If AMD beats Intel to releasing a SATA 6Mb/second controller, doesn't that make AMD a leader?