Seagate Doubles Hard Drive Speed Limits with New 6 Gb/s SATA

As ultra-fast SSDs push the boundaries of the old SATA standard, Seagate and AMD prepare to take one giant step forward.

Though few hard drives on the market can even come close to the current 3 Gb/s speed limit on the Serial ATA (SATA) standard, Seagate and AMD are marching forward with a new standard that’s purportedly twice as fast. Both companies demonstrated drives that used the new 6 GB/s standard at a conference on Monday in New Orleans.

Normally, drive hardware acts as the biggest limitation on speed, with the SATA standard acting only a theoretical limit on peak transfer rates. But according to Seagate, the new standard comes just as some manufacturers have managed to begin bumping against the speed limit on the old 3 Gb/s standard, especially ultra-fast SSDs.

“Flash will take advantage [of the new interface], in applicable markets, sooner than you think,” Seagate’s senior marketing I/O development manager Marc Noblitt told ExtremeTech.

Seagate hasn’t yet announced any products that will use 6 Gb/s transfer rates, but said in a press release that drives will be shipping by late 2009, with AMD producing the motherboard chips necessary to take advantage of them.