News - Seagate ships world's first SATA 6Gb/s hard drive, the 2TB Barracuda XT

[HEXUS]

Time to put that third-generation SATA 6Gb/s interface to use.

Read more.

[TheAnimus]

And the point of 6gb/s for a slow drive is?

Have i miss understood something, i've not implemented my own sata controller like i did for IDE, so i'm doing a lot of 'gessing'.

But i thought that was 6 point to point? This drive is well within nyquest for 3gb/s surely?

Is it really going to be less latent?

[cordas]

OOOO Shiny!!!

[miniyazz]

"notably quicker"

Shame SATA I is quick enough for it, nevermind SATA 6Gb/s.. fairly ridiculous, but I spose there might be no point in not doing so. Only thing it'll help with is small writes where the cache *may* be able to take advantage of the increased interface speed, if it's fast enough.

Basically, it's totally pointless lol.

[shaithis]

Dman, just bought 2 1.5TB drives...

Maybe I should have waited!

[Breezey]

Dman, just bought 2 1.5TB drives...

Maybe I should have waited!

For what? the original Sata 1 interface is still more than fast enough for the current range of desktop Sata drives.

[shaithis]

For what? the original Sata 1 interface is still more than fast enough for the current range of desktop Sata drives.

Prices on 1.5TB drives to start dropping as the 2TB ones start filtering out....

The SATA3 interface I couldn't care less about, at least for a couple more years of SSD advances

[ca197]

The SATA3 interface I couldn't care less about, at least for a couple more years of SSD advances

Actually the latest Intel and OCZ drives are hitting 270Mbps and are bouncing off the limit of what SATA 3Gbps can deliver. 6Gbps makes a lot of sense even now for SSD's. Standard HDD's I agree slightly pointless.

[shaithis]

Theorectially, SATA-II @ 3Gbps should top out close to 384MB/s...still a way to go yet.....and TBH, 384MB/s transfer speeds I could live with for a year or 2, plus I normally RAID my drives, making individual speed barriers less significant

[cordas]

What will be the implications of running a drive on SATAII and a drive on SATA 6G in the same machine?

Maybe the advantage of this drive is that you will be able to run a clean SATA 6G setup using this "non-legacy" drive... At the end of the day this drive is backwards compatible so there is no downside to it supporting 6G.... Also its a piece of marketing spin, its really not worth getting your panties in such a bunch about I suggest.....

[miniyazz]

Theorectially, SATA-II @ 3Gbps should top out close to 384MB/s...still a way to go yet.....and TBH, 384MB/s transfer speeds I could live with for a year or 2, plus I normally RAID my drives, making individual speed barriers less significant

Theoretically it's 375MB/s isn't it? 3000/8 = 375
However with overheads etc it's recognised to be around 100MB/s slower than that in real world usage.

What will be the implications of running a drive on SATAII and a drive on SATA 6G in the same machine?

Maybe the advantage of this drive is that you will be able to run a clean SATA 6G setup using this "non-legacy" drive... At the end of the day this drive is backwards compatible so there is no downside to it supporting 6G.... Also its a piece of marketing spin, its really not worth getting your panties in such a bunch about I suggest.....

What happened with SATA II and SATA I drives is you adjusted a jumper on the SATA II drives to make them SATA I compatible if using an older SATA controller.. but I can't remember if you had to set the SATA controller to SATA I if using SATA I drives on a SATA II controller

[LuckyNV]

Big numbers sell, anyone remember Pentium "more GHz is better" 4?



I wonder when Seagate will get in on the SSD game =.=

[Funkstar]

Theoretically it's 375MB/s isn't it? 3000/8 = 375

how about 3072/8 = 384

binary is base 2 remember.

[miniyazz]

how about 3072/8 = 384

binary is base 2 remember.

Hehe good thinking. However it won't save you in this case as 3Gb/s does in fact = 3000Mb/s, at least according to wikipedia. Also apparently due to 8b/10b encoding overheads, the theoretical maximum is actually 300MB/s, hence I guess why the real-world maximum performance of somewhat under that. So

[shaithis]

Bottom line is....in 2 years you still will not be saturating SATA-II on a regular basis.

The whole deal with SSDs is that random reads are substantially better then sequential because they happen substantially more often.

You are only likely to max the interface doing sequential reads with next gen technology.

[cordas]

Bottom line is....in 2 years you still will not be saturating SATA-II on a regular basis.

The whole deal with SSDs is that random reads are substantially better then sequential because they happen substantially more often.

You are only likely to max the interface doing sequential reads with next gen technology.

SSDs are already head bumping, put them in raid and they already way oversaturate SATAII.... Thats why companies are building SSD PCIe devices... SATA6G Will give benefits to SSD technology today, as there would be nothing to stop them building a raid disk in one package.

The thing is that next gen infrastructure like SATA 6G needs to be implemented before its needed not after its needed.

OK it might not be needed for HDDs for years (if ever, if the technology becomes redundant as capacity goes up and costs come down on SSDs), but when i build a new system I will looking to do so leaving as much legacy kit behind as I can..... So I would rate this drive over a comparable SATAII drive simply for that. As I have a SATAII DVD drive (IDE would more than adequate for those needs even today).