Faster SATA standard coming in second quarter of this year, says SATA-IO

The folks behind the Serial ATA standard have been working on drafting a new, faster spec for a little while now, but it looks like things are finally starting to firm up, and SATA-IO marketing chair Conrad Maxwell now says that the new 6Gb/s standard is on track for release in the second quarter of this year. That, as you're no doubt aware, is twice as fast as the current spec and, according to Maxwell, it'll be backwards compatible with both the SATA-1.5Gb/s and SATA-3Gb/s specs. What's more, it's apparently also the group's intention to double the E-SATA spec to 6Gb/s as well, although no one seems to be making any promises on a date for that just yet. As a bit of a bonus, the group will apparently also be rolling out a new Power over ESATA spec (or ESATAp), which will allow 5 or 12 volts of power to be delivered via an ESATA connector.

[sam @ Jan 7th 2009 2:29PM]

"What's more, it's apparently also the group's intention to double the E-SATA spec to 6Mb/s as well, although no one seems to be making any promises on a date for that just yet"

i hope you mean 6Gb/s otherwise thats gunna be a bloody slow new e-sata standard!

[Testies, Testies, 1, 2... 3? @ Jan 7th 2009 2:33PM]

Freak I'm excited!

I was so suck of my Western Digital peaking at 65MB/s on SATA I, now it's screaming at 65MB/s on SATA II sweet!!

[KarlW @ Jan 7th 2009 3:20PM]

This is good news for people wanting hyper performance with SSD drives. If you're using a spinning drive, you don't need to bother with this: No spinning disk is anywhere near close to maxing out SATA2.

So if you're using a spinning hard disk (and considering the price disparity, I'm going to assume most of you do), don't think that upgrading your motherboard to work with this new spec will change anything. The SATA interface currently isn't the bottleneck unless you're in a lab devising the next generation of SSD drives.

[loosely_coupled @ Jan 7th 2009 9:10PM]

To both you guys above:

1) Even standard 2.5/3.5" drives that get ~65MB/sec have high speed DRAM cache which can easily saturate a SATA/eSATA link. Granted, it's not a large concern, but it is something.

2) More importantly, many eSATA ports can be used with port multipliers so you can hook up external RAID arrays. A three (10K/15K RPM) or four disk (7200RPM) RAID array can saturate an existing SATA/300 link.

3) Obviously SSDs change the whole game, with newer, lower-cost MLC SSDs able to sustain 200MB/sec read rates -- and burst even higher. SATA/300 is already a bottleneck if you RAID a pair of these on the same SATA link.

[Najakwa @ Jan 7th 2009 2:30PM]

i wish eSATAp would take over the world.

[Photon @ Jan 7th 2009 3:12PM]

I wish SAS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI) would take over the world.

[kjb434 @ Jan 7th 2009 2:41PM]

This is one standards group that gets things moving (literally)!

SATA has been a great evolution away from IDE. Particularly if you want an un-clutterred case interior for desktops.

[Randy @ Jan 7th 2009 2:47PM]

Agreed, while I welcome Power over E-SATA, It would reduce the cabling even further if they could provide power over the internal SATA cables. I would likely require a new plug/cable, but I can dream.

[Oli D @ Jan 7th 2009 2:55PM]

Randy is wise like an owl, although i think that would leave the inside of my pc case looking anemic, i think you need a random spread of cables twisting, entwining, tangling to some degree, otherwise it just looks like lego.

[Sharron Field @ Apr 21st 2009 10:25PM]

- Speaking of Lego: -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfyNzIL5HW0

'Good thinking Randy. 'Neat idea. There's too many power cables hanging around inside any box.

[Precurse @ Jan 7th 2009 2:50PM]

I love SATA.. Using a serial architecture makes it that much cheaper to make/sell. Gone are the days of $5+ IDE cables! Companies throw in SATA cables like it's paper. I literally have 20 extra SATA cables laying in my spare parts box - Never have to hunt around again (unlike IDE cables)

I, for one, welcome our new SATA 6gbit overlords !

[Oli D @ Jan 7th 2009 2:56PM]

What was the rate on IDE compared to SATA I?

[Precurse @ Jan 7th 2009 3:01PM]

IDE is a max of 133MB/s (there's a 266MB/s spec, but was never used since SATA was released), while SATA I is 1.5Gb/s (or 150MB/s after overhead).

Hope that helps

[loosely_coupled @ Jan 7th 2009 9:17PM]

SATA/1.5Gb[s = 20% overhead = SATA/150MB
SATA/3.0Gps = 20% overhead = SATA/300MB (sometimes called "SATA II") also the speed of eSATA
SATA/6.0Gbps = 20% overhead = SATA/600MB (no doubt some will call it "SATA III")

[Jack @ Jan 7th 2009 3:03PM]

Wow, 6Gb/s by the second half of this year! hmm... Well looks like SATA is on it's way out then because with the change in medium coming and the slowness of a new spec to be implemented (3 or 4 years at least) they are already behind. There are already products (read memory drives) on the market that don't use a SATA connection because of it's limitations of speed, give it a good year or two and the standard SSD will cripple the new spec.. They really should start thinking about something beyond 10Gb/s if they want to still be in systems a few years from now.

[Precurse @ Jan 7th 2009 3:08PM]

Why is it on it's way out? Do you know any [affordable] external USB/SSD disks that can read/write faster than even 3Gb/s (300MB/s)? Last I checked, even among the fastest USB sticks (OCZ Rally2) can only read at a rate of 30-40MB/s. If you're comparing USB3 to SATA, remember that the USB bus is shared. Unless there's a separate controller per connector on the motherboard (which I doubt), you'll be sharing the bandwidth between multiple ports. 6Gb/s (600MB/s) is still more than ANY hard drive can handle (unless you use port multipliers), and consumer based SSDs for the foreseeable future.

[Oli D @ Jan 7th 2009 3:12PM]

served

[Adam Zey @ Jan 7th 2009 7:22PM]

Even a decent MLC SSD from Intel (which are currently the best bang for your buck and are decently affordable) will push 220MB/s read speeds... and cheap 1.5TB drives (which I've seen almost as low as $100 USD when on sale) will push ~100MB/s average reads.

When you start considering drive caches, 300MB/s isn't really fast enough.

[Adam Zey @ Jan 7th 2009 7:22PM]

Precurse: USB2 limits data transfers to roughly 35MB/s. USB2-based storage will never GET any faster than "30-40MB/s" even if the devices themselves could go faster if provided with a decent interface.

My external USB hard drives are capable of pushing 100MB/s average sustained transfer rates, but USB limits that on my system to about 30MB/s. So there's a pretty big bottleneck there.

[loosely_coupled @ Jan 7th 2009 9:46PM]

@Jack

Ha.. on it's way out? Considering the IDE->EIDE->(P)ATA->SATA lineage has been going since I was born, I highly doubt it. What exactly would replace SATA? SAS (hardly any faster)? A PCIe Slot? SATA and SAS are more than just hardware connectors, they represent an entire low-level I/O protocol with features designed specifically for mass storage devices. External USB/firewire harddrives are NOT native, they use an internal bridge to SATA.

Secondly, SATA/6Gbps will provide real-world 600MB/sec per channel, neither of which will be a bottleneck for any HDD or SSD drive in existence. The fastest SSDs can only do about a sustained 225MB/sec. The only situation where you need such high interface speed is where you want a RAID setup but you only have one channel, like an eSATA port on a PC. With a port multiplier, you can have multiple drives on one channel.

And for god sakes, if someone is maxing out 600MB/sec with a crazy RAID array, then they sure as hell shouldn't be using a PC grade storage interface. In that case, they would be using a SAS-based RAID array with the Infiniband connector..

[RaiD @ Jan 7th 2009 3:16PM]

Couldn't agree more with "Testies, Testies, 1, 2... 3?" (he chose the name I didn't). Instead of developing a new standard that we won't likely be able to utilize for a long while, work on improving or eliminating the current bottleneck - hard drives. Let's face it, SSDs are a huge disappointment and still way too costly, and therefore not practical. Hell, do away with hard drives all together and think outside the box. Develop some holographic storage technology or some shit. It's 2009 and every damn year these companies are just improving a 20+ yr old hard drive design.

[Oli D @ Jan 7th 2009 3:22PM]

I think that SSDs are getting there, they have just reached the price that i am prepared to pay for the extra performance.

£60 for a 32Gb ADATA MLC SSD, SATA II, boots vista and gOS very quickly, loving the zero seek time (theoretical)

[loosely_coupled @ Jan 7th 2009 10:04PM]

Could you make a more idiotic comment?

"Let's face it, SSDs are a huge disappointment and still way too costly, and therefore not practical"
Huge disappointment?? Are you out of your mind? The latest gen drives can sustain 200MB/100MB read/write in 2.5" form factors that use 1/5th the power of a 10K RPM harddrive that is half as fast. And random I/O is 10X faster.

Cost wise, they have come down in price by a factor of 3-4X in the last few years. Not long ago, standard 128GB drives used to routinely sell for $3500-$4000! You can now buy a new laptop with a 128GB SSD for only about ~$600/$700 more than a standard HDD. You can pickup 64GB SSDs for a couple hundred dollars.

"Develop some holographic storage technology or some shit. It's 2009 and every damn year these companies are just improving a 20+ yr old hard drive design."

Ahem? Yea, that is realistic... You are complaining about $700 SSDs, but you want consumer priced holographic storage?

[Jack @ Jan 7th 2009 3:17PM]

Precurse..

Actually when you deliver a spec you can't look at what's happening NOW, you have to look to the future, and actually I wan't referring to USB memory drives or the current crop of SSD drives for that matter but there are products that use non-volatile memory that connect to the PCI-e bus right now that surpass 600MB/s Write speed (featured on engadget a few months back, and that's right now. Affordable, maybe not right NOW, but within a few years.... something to think about.

[Oli D @ Jan 7th 2009 3:24PM]

unserved

[Precurse @ Jan 7th 2009 3:30PM]

While that PCI-e SSD will take quite a few years before it'll even come close to being consumer-priced, I do believe the SATA3 spec could be faster. However, given the high cpu consumption of USB, the pricey licensing of Firewire 800+, pricey fiberchannel, and I don't think IDE will be coming back, ever, what options are we left with? We can't be plugging PCI-E cards into computers for disks, as the connectors are bulky in comparison with what SATA has, and probably won't clear some cases (small form factor). So unless you have some amazing new technology, that you invented and can release tomorrow, I don't see SATA being abandoned very soon.

[Wolfticket @ Jan 7th 2009 3:24PM]

Poooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooower!

[nxp3 @ Jan 7th 2009 4:42PM]

I was about to say I'm pissed at all these new connectors but luckily they're backward compatible. I mean I'm tired of having so many different power connectors and having to buy adapters on some of them, adapters are just ugly. Stick with a damn standard will ya...for more than a year!

[Wwhat @ Jan 7th 2009 4:54PM]

They stupidly forgot to include power with the e-sata specs, meaning it's a bit of an annoying mess and even low-power notebook drives need an external powersupply to use e-sata so far, one of the biggest blunders in standards for a long time.
So this time the change was really really needed, and it's just a few pins to deliver power over the same cable.

[Wwhat @ Jan 7th 2009 4:50PM]

The e-sata standard is about the connectors, not the interface, the interface is the same, you can plug a bracket for e-sata into your sata connector and have e-sata, it's simple.
Feel free tp correct me if I'm wrong

[JLM @ Jan 7th 2009 6:43PM]

Wow... 6Gb/s...
Nomex gloves are include in package?

[RoboDan @ Jan 7th 2009 11:36PM]

Yay for SAS

I too wish it were pushed to the mainstream

[ecking01 @ Jan 8th 2009 12:23AM]

eSatap is gonna be awesome for mobile video editing.