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.
