SATA Revision 3.0 released
The eagerly awaited new specification for hard-drive interconnects was released today, promising file-transfer speeds of up to six gigabits per second. The cleverly acronymed Serial ATA International Organization - SATA-IO - on Wednesday announced that the SATA Revision 3.0 specification was officially ready for public …
"Think, for example, of an elevator. It doesn't matter in which order an elevator's floor buttons are pushed, it'll stop at each floor in sequence. So with NCQ"
Thank you for reaching for the lowest common denominator there...
--"The standard is called SATA Revision 3.0, not SATA 3.0. There's no such thing as SATA 3.0"--
How much would you like to bet that 1 year from now, hardly anyone will be using the full moniker SATA Revision 3.0. People ( many journalists especially ) are extremely lazy with their tech talk and typing SATA 3.0 is just so much easier.
... when the connection system is so crappy that the plugs have to be superglued to stop them falling out
That's why you should use good Sata cables with clips :)
Paris because her receptacle accepts any connector.
when is there going to be a 2TB SATA Revision 3 Barracuda in my desktop????
and, are the drives actually going to be capable of 6gb/s sustained speed, not just burst?
doubt even sata revision 8 when it comes would stand up to one of these loaded with some old ddr2: http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
they have some interesting statistics involving a 12 million row MySQL table, and a server with hardware RAID for comparison :)
Superglue??
What?? I have never EVER had to use glue on any plug with a SATA drive. I guess some people just love IDE....
On a side note WTF who the hell is going to use that naming system?
"6Gb/s - twice as fast as current specification."
So that means SATA 2.0 should be capable of 3Gb/s - I've never seen a drive which can go any where near that fast (375 MB/s) - so doubling the spec seems a bit stupid. Especially when you then introduce a naming convention which requires the 6Gb/s to be part of the product name - because I doubt the drive will actually go that fast.
And even if the drive does go that fast, I can't believe that the OS can actually manage data I/O at that speed anyway.
and @ Will Godfrey - I have never seen a sata cable disconnect. If you have the problem, buy the ones with the little metal clip on then.
Ever broken the SATA connector off? It is much easier than you think. At least with IDE it is more the pins that bend, not like with SATA where the connector board that slips into the connector on the cable, snaps, or perhaps the plastic tab that ensures that you are plugging the cable in correctly...
full speed
high speed
super speed
(warp speed)*
(ludicrous speed)*
* names reserved for future revisions
They should give it up and adopt SAS already.
Some mention above of RAM type drives: those things should be plugged directly into the PCIe bus, not the SATA bus.
Have a happy day.
I think that's going to work as well as Google telling people not to say "I googled it". People are just going to use SATA 3.
The USB full speed/high speed crap is just as bad.
Unfortunately I often see cheap crap that other peeps have bought (from dlroW CP) with everything inside jammed together and laced up with a couple of cable ties. I don't have the option of selecting decent cables - if the design was half way practical it wouldn't be a problem - and yes, I have had the stupid PCB thingies break off.
As soon as you start using "SATA 3" for it, you end up with hundreds of people asking on forums as to whether a SATA 3 drive is compatible with a SATA 2 motherboard and if new cables etc. will be required.
The benefit of SATA 6Gb/s naming is that it removes the empasis from the different version numbers of the spec and helps people understand that SATA is just SATA (albeit with new features etc). Also, it follows the naming of IDE drives. These if you remember were referred to as ATA33, ATA66, ATA100 etc and not ATA 1 ATA 2 and ATA 3.
"I've never seen a drive which can go any where near that fast"
Just because most current drives cannot acheive the speed doesnt mean the bandwidth isnt usefull for something.
Take for instance SATA rev1 @ 150MB/s. When it was released most drives didn't even come close to reaching it. Now we have flash drives putting through sustained rates of over 200MB/s. In addition, if the data is already in the devices cache, it will be read at (at least close to) the bus speed.
The interface speed should always stay ahead of the device speed as, sooner or later, the devices will catch up.
Incidentally, IIRC, SATA rev2 @ 3GB/s is capable of 300MB/s, not 375, due to the 10/8 encoding scheme used.
"Ever broken the SATA connector off?"
No. I once broke off a SCSI disk-to-motherboard ribbon cable connector though. Spending 3 hours re-soldering at 2am it taught me to be very careful with all connectors.
The current 3Gb/s uses 8/10b encoding, so it's maximum speed is 300MB/s, minus a tiny amount for data transfer overhead. If you look at really good SSDs, you'll see that they really are approaching this speed cap, so a 600MB/s standard really is welcome for them.
USB 3.0
SATA 3.0
Does this mean that Web 3.0 is imminent?
"NCQ intelligently reorders read/write commands sent to a drive by its host, sequencing them in such a way as to perform them in order of when the tracks and sectors they involve are available."
IBM mainframe drives were doing that in the 1970's
AndyD 8-)#
SATA3 is a much better name. When I but a motherboard or HD I want to know what "revision" SATA and USB it has. USB's full speed, high speed & super speed meets bollox all to me, even now! USB, USB2 & USB3 however I completely understand. What speed? Who cares! all i'm bothered about is buying A USB2 as it's faster than USB, I don;t give a monkeys what the speed actually is, I can find that out if I really need it.
Any now SATA is going the same way, If someone says do you want SATA2gb or 4GB, I'll say is that SATA1 and 3?, 1&2?, 2&3? as THAT'S what i'm bothered about!
As for them saying SATA2 confuses people what bollox! SATA 2gb confuses us! we want to know what version/revision we are using. OK so we COULD say SATA revision 3, but like EVERYTHING it will get shortened to save type saying it or writing it, so it STILL will end up being SATA3 !!!! Try doing some real life real people research!
So when someone mentions SATA3, do they mean SATA revision 3 or SATA @ 3Gb/sec? That's why SATA-IO wanted to make that abundantly clear. Perhaps they're trying to get people to think of SATA versions in terms of their speed, say SATA1.5, SATA3, and SATA6, much as ATA specs were mentioned in the old days. Were you confused about ATA66, ATA100, and so on? As long as there's a consensus, there should be little to complain about.
As for the need for 6Gb/sec, SSDs have already been mentioned. In particular, RAM-based drives could easily fill the bus speed. Another possibility is port splitting, two or more drives taking up the same channel (we moved away from that with the initial SATA jump, but extra bandwidth reopens the possibility for particular instances).
"The standard is called SATA Revision 3.0, not SATA 3.0. There's no such thing as SATA 3.0"
Yeah, that's right up there with "Please refer to them as Lego Bricks or Lego Toys, not "Legos"." See how long that lasts.
I have trouble seeing additional value in new SATA specs until they can integrate the power/data cables, actually making eSATA into a worthwhile standard as well as clearing up tons of internal system clutter.
Sign up, sign up for Blocks and Files, The Reg's weekly storage newsletter
