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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marraco - Monday, March 9, 2009 - link
Is a minor improvement over today SATA II.It will not support the SSD disks performance.
William Gaatjes - Monday, March 9, 2009 - link
If the bandwith increase keeps up, it might in the near future be more usefull to implement a SSD harddrive with a hypertransport channel. The harddrive would be connected directly with the cpu. Let an adapted form of the standard MMU manage the hardrive. A cpu with 2 Memory management unit's would be needed. 1 for main dram memory and the other for flash mem. When later on the fasttrack ram and the memristor memory technology come out, we will finally have real instant on computers.Wrzesien - Monday, March 9, 2009 - link
It looks like this year we will see SSD RAID cards that connect through the PCIe x8 slot. Kind of reminds me of the classic 20MB "hardcard" for the ISA slot! Except this is 800MB/s of 1TB SSD RAID with a 256MB cache. Not out of this world price-wise either!http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&nu...">http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getart...ber=1&am...
Wrzesien - Monday, March 9, 2009 - link
My bad...speeds for this drive are officially:• Max Read: up to 600MB/s
• Max Write: up to 500MB/s
• Sustained Write: up to 400MB/s
Assuming the Intel SSD's are faster someone could build something for 800MB/s too.
LuxZg - Monday, March 9, 2009 - link
OK, thre are people here that sound like Bill Gates with his "noone will need this much memory" speech..There is never "too much". Actually, if you ask me - I wonder why they haven't made SATA "1" at 6 Gbps initialy, than we wouldn't have had worried about different motherboards and all that for a while longer.
So yes, I'm all for SATA3. Only complaint is - why not 60 Gbps :P
More is better, maybe a marketing gimmick today, but in future it will again be too little. So I'd rather be prepared than sorry...
Oh, should I say that I wouldn't mind at all if they had this 10y ago, than I wouldn't have to worry about old computers without USBs, withous SATA, without ethernet, without PCIe slots etc..
The more the better.. always..
epobirs - Saturday, March 14, 2009 - link
For your first sentence to make sense there would have to be no other comments. Just silence. Why? Because Gates never made any such statement. That stupid myth needs to die.defter - Monday, March 9, 2009 - link
Let's do the math:64MB buffer, 290MB/s transfer speed: 0.22 seconds to read the whole buffer
With 580MB/s tranfer speed (2x) you save only 0.11 seconds if you lucky enough that all necessary data is buffered.
Or when transferring 1GB of data with HDD speed of 120MB/s:
current SATA-300: 0.22 + 7.8 = about 8 seconds
new SATA-600: 0.11 + 7.8 = about 7.9 seconds, which is just 1% faster.
For most users, this is just a marketing gimmick, just like previous versions of SATA or AGP/PCI-E initially. It will take few years before it will become really useful.
UNHchabo - Monday, March 9, 2009 - link
For sustained transfers, you're right -- cache speed isn't a big deal. However, for small transfers, it makes a big difference. Think about how many files on your computer are less than 64MB. Pretty much all of them, except for video files longer than 10 minutes.Cache latency is measured in microseconds, as opposed to normal hard disk latency, which is measured in milliseconds. That means if you ask the disk for something that's not in cache, you have to wait roughly 1000 times longer in order to start receiving data at 120MB/s, instead of getting data back almost instantly at 580MB/s.
defter - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - link
Actually, with smaller files the difference becomes even more insignificant. For example, transferring 10MB file from disk's cache would take 0.034 seconds with current SATA-300. With SATA-600 you would only save 0.017 seconds, would you notice such difference? Probably not.[quote]Cache latency is measured in microseconds, as opposed to normal hard disk latency, which is measured in milliseconds. That means if you ask the disk for something that's not in cache, you have to wait roughly 1000 times longer in order to start receiving data at 120MB/s, instead of getting data back almost instantly at 580MB/s.[/quote]
I agree that cache is very useful, but this story is about faster SATA standard, which increases only the speed of sustained transfer. It will not grow the cache.
JarredWalton - Monday, March 9, 2009 - link
Isn't that the whole purpose of Windows' data prefetching and caching system? SuperFetch tries to put as many commonly used files and applications into RAM as possible. What's more important: 4GB of SuperFetch cache running at a bandwidth of 10000MB/s or more, or faster hard drive caches that run at a bandwidth of 300 (or 600 with this) MB/s? Not that SuperFetch or Windows caching in general does a perfect job of caching important data, but I'd think it would be easy enough to set up a much larger, faster cache in RAM than anything we'll see on HDDs in the near future.