Seagate demos world's first SATA 6Gbps hard disk as speed-freaks swoon
By Thomas Ricker 
posted March 9th 2009 9:43AM
posted March 9th 2009 9:43AM
[Via CNET]
Read -- SATA 6Gbps demonstration
Read -- First half of 2009 launch
posted March 9th 2009 9:43AM
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I'm not now.
:3
I've got SATA II 3Gbps hard drives, and the maximum transfer rate i can get is 65 or so MB/s. Even though SATA has capacity to go 3Gbps (more than 300MB/s); what really is the point of 6Gbps, when we (end users) can't even fully use the 3Gbps standard??
SSD's are hitting the 300 MB/s limit already
When it comes to burst speeds, you can significantly beat 65mbyte/s. If hard drive makers ever put in "serious" drive caches, burst speed could become even more important.
I'm also getting about the same transfer speed of ~63MB/s but I'm still on IDE. So what's the point of wider channels if the drives can't read/write that fast?
PCI-E based is so much faster than this :/
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-40359-135.html
it's all about the E-Peen factor these days
@ xtreme - I agree with you. Just about every part of every electronic device has a theoretical level of performance that cannot be achieved anywhere else but in the lab. However, that is where the marketing and legal people come in. Marketing suckers us into thinking that no matter what we are still going to achieve outstanding performance. At the same time, legal is writing the fine print to tell you that you might not achieve that performance because of your system configuration, or the temperature, or your altitude relative to sea level, or because it's 2:00 in the afternoon, or because you are not just playing Solitaire, etc., etc., etc....
What series of drive do you have? Sata II 3Gbps standard has been around a while... I have the new 7200.12 drives and mine tops out at ~133MB/1.06Gbps/sec which isn't too bad. Drive speeds take a while to catch up to the interface... However if they actually have a new drive/interface combo that works at 589MBps I would be impressed.
re: suisickle
Perhaps you've never heard of a Raid 0 setup before, eh? RAID absolutely crushes SATA's thresholds if you have the right HDDs. With 2 WD raptor 10ks, you'll break 200 MB/sec reads pretty easily. Add more HDDs or go to SDD RAID or NAS and you can easily saturate SATA 3G.
Saying that upgrading to the new spec is for suckers means you know nothing about what's out there right now. You probably have a Dell XPS and a Pentium 4. Let the big kids talk--this stuff is over your head.
You are right, that picture above is just a measurement of the speed coming from the RAM cache of the harddrive... that said, SSDs are already pushing over teh 3.0Gbps limit..
I guess I'll close that newegg tab with my cart full of new computer parts.
im about to by a laptop but i can always switch the hd out for this right?
(by the way, should i go for a 2.26ghz processor or wait till i have enough for a 2.8 or 2.9? would the difference be worth it?)
Well Photoshop plugins run faster on the higher GHz machines. They don't often take advantage of multiple cores.
"with AMD prototype 6Gbps SATA chipset"
Are you planning to replace the chipset of a laptop too? Good luck with that and let us know how you got on. (That means no to you and me.)
(Regarding your BTY: value and worth of objects are relative to you. If you want it for the mere fact that you will own better parts then no. If you are going to make use of the difference in the work that you do then yes.)
@jeff... no dont really plan on using photoshop... gaming and 1080p video really
@ebzy... ok, ok... dont kill me i mustve skipped over that part... eheh... (and... i basically want a really good gaming machine :) so yea... i plan on "making use of the difference"... if there is any)
Well, a couple of things here. First, this is a prototype, so it will be at least a year, probably more before it reaches the market. Second, as has been stated in this thread several times, the current limitation is almost entirely with the hard drives themselves, not the chipsets. The average transfer rate for a 7,200 RPM hard drive is about 60-65 MB/s and current SATA II speeds max out at over 300 MB/s. Third, most laptop drives run at 5,400 RPM to save on power so you are even less likely to hit the max SATA II speed, although many laptop manufacturers offer the option to upgrade to a 7,200 RPM drive. Fourth, as was already stated this is a chipset that would be built into the motherboard of your computer. When new 6 Gps SATA hard drives will arrive on the market, if you put them in a SATA II slot, they will run at SATA II speeds (3 Gps).
All that said, if you want a gaming computer I would highly recommend you build a desktop for several reasons. It will be cheaper and easier to upgrade. While laptops are more portable, gaming laptops tend to have really short battery life, weigh a lot, are comparatively expensive, and just generally be a pain to carry around.
This should help with those multi disc RAIDs needed for uncompressed 4K editing. We may yet eliminate SCSI.
Isn't 600MBps more like... nearly 5Gbps?
And by nearly I mean, with still 0.3Gbps to go.
Yes. MBps (MegaBYTES per second) and Mbps (MegaBITS per second) are two totally different things.
1 MBps = 8 Mbps.
So yes, 600MBps = 4800Mbps.
Remember, folks, 1 Byte is made up of 8 Bits.
SATA uses at a 10bit word scheme, with 2 bits for parity, IIRC; a 6Gbps SATA interface would yield a maximum real transfer rate of 600MBps.
Can we just stick to MB and GB not Mb and Gb... Gb makes it sound so much better than it really is..
Next up is over 9000!!!!! (Mb/s)
Seagate you said? No thank you. I've lost all my faith in that company. Maybe WD.
Fail.
You do realize that Seagate is bigger than WD, and that almost ALL of WD's HDD's use licensed Seagate technology, right?
/s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital
MikeC, it doesn't mean a thing. The fact remains that ever since Seagate bought, and combined its product line with, Maxtor, their quality has gone down the crapper. I've been a faithful Seagate customer for years. But, although I didn't suffer the pains of their failing 1.5TB hdd failures. I think the company's slow, and inefficient, response to fix it, plus banning negative comments on its boards makes me doubt their faith in their own products.
600Mbs = 0.6Gbps not 6Gbps....
It is 600MB/s, not 600Mb/s
.6GBps = 76.8MBps :/
^ .6Gbps* = 76.8MBps
no freakin edit button :/
That's right, but the picture shows 600MB/s, not Mb/s.
Their test speed was roughly 600 MB/s...
600 MB/s = 4800 Mb/s = 4.69 Gb/s
(Note, MB to GB conversions aren't factors of 10, they're factors of 2)
(Replying to AdamWho)
still no edit button :/
2^10 to be precise
So, serious question.
Are HD transfer speeds calculated in Hard Drive Gb/s (Base 10) or Computer Gb/s (Base 2)?
The whole idea that storage space on a hard drive is still measured in base 10 (ie Base 10 megabyte = 1,000,000 and Base 2 megabyte = 1,048,576) makes no sense to me.
All transfer rates use the base-10 number system, because time in seconds (along with every other unit in the SI) is represented in base-10. Operating systems and JEDEC use base-2 representation because the solid state binary devices, such as RAM and CPUs, are inherently base-2 (hence binary devices).
As SATA uses 10bit words, and as throughput is measured in base-10 (1MB = 1000kB etc), a 6GHz SATA link yields a maximum transfer rate of 600MBps.
AMD is the best. without question
very nice, hopefully motherboards with Sata3 and usb3 will ship mid 2009 maybe. Anymore upcoming standards that i'm forgetting?
PCI Express 3.0?
Bluetooth 3
1394b S3200
Or, more advanced, 1394c (different cables, instead of just different speed)
And if you count things that are not "version 3", then TransferJet.
Nice, and after a few months perhaps the drive may become unusable and undetected !!! lololl
nice...so by june we will see 12g/s
Seagate ftw for storage! never failed me, long life, high performance.
but i do have a couple of WD caviar black on raid-0... those are nice.
The SATA 6Gbps is simply the *interconnect* speed between the host-system and the device. Is it not the spindle or media-rate of the drive.
A simple example would be your PCI-E bus - you can have a throughput of 250MB/s per lane, but a PCI-E-based device does not mean it can run at 250MB/s (e.g. Network Cards).
kashif
Won't matter unless they fix their reputation on their recent batch of 1TB hard drives.
thats true. that damn bug can't happen again. thats real nasty.
Im not sure.
Is it about SATA as a channel speed or SATA as a hardware speed?
ridiculous speeds
i thought 288.55MB/s is 288.55*8Mbps which is merely 2308.4Mb/s which isnt 3Mb/s....how do they made that claim
same with 6Gb/s 589.09MB/s which is 4712.12Mb/s which isnt event 5Gb/s
im confused
am i an ignorant or is there a typo
im lost...