The Serial ATA International Organisation (SATA-IO) has finalised and released revision 3.0 of the SATA specification, paving the way for transfer speeds of up to 6Gb/s - double that of the existing SATA 3Gb/s standard commonly known as SATA II.
SATA 6Gb/s was first presented as a draft specification in July 2008, and its final revision arrived yesterday with a number of enhancements including:
- A new Native Command Queueing (NCQ) streaming command to enable isochronous data transfers for bandwidth-hungry audio and video applications
- An NCQ Management feature that helps optimise performance by enabling host processing and management of outstanding NCQ commands
- Improved power management capabilities
- A small Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for more compact 1.8-inch storage devices
- A connector designed to accommodate 7mm optical disk drives for thinner and lighter notebooks
- Alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standard
Speeds of up to 6Gb/s may appear to be overkill when taking into account the performance of modern hard disk drives, but the improved transfer speeds should prove to be beneficial to modern flash-based storage solutions such as SSDs.
SATA 6Gb/s is backward compatible with SATA 3Gb/s, and we're expecting to see a range of supporting hardware at next week's COMPUTEX trade show.
