Seagate, teaming with microprocessor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) unveiled what the two company’s are calling the world’s first public demonstration of next-generation high-speed data transfer – Serial ATA 6 GBPS for bandwidth-hungry desktop and laptop PC applications including gaming, streaming video and graphics multimedia.
The Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second storage interface will deliver high performance – burst speeds of up to 6 GBPS – for all PC applications, maintain backward compatibility with the SATA 3 GBPS and SATA 1.5 GBPS interfaces, and use the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration, Seagate said.
The third generation of the mainstream storage interface for desktop and notebook computers also has power efficiency and improves Native Command Queuing, a SATA feature, to increase overall system performance and data transfer speeds of mainstream PC applications but especially applications with heavily transactional workloads such as scientific modeling and forecasting, and engineering design and simulation.
The Seagate and AMD demonstration features two Seagate SATA disk drives – one a shipping Barracuda 7200.12 3GBPS hard drive and the other a prototype Barracuda 6GBPS drive – in a desktop PC to show the performance difference between the two generations. The PC is powered by an AMD prototype SATA 6GBPS chipset. The Seagate SATA 3GBPS drive runs at more than 2.5GBPS and the SATA 6GBPS drive at 5.5GBPS, with the performance of each storage interface displayed on the PC monitor.