Sata spec update to yield faster, thinner netbooks
Sata 3.0 ups peak speed to 6Gb/s too
Serial ATA 3.0 is go, the Sata-IO industry body announced yesterday.
Sata 3.0 doubles the bus' current peak bandwidth to 6Gb/s, improves its power-conservation capabilities and upgrades the standard's Native Command Queuing (NCQ) technology to add streaming and better command management, all designed to make it easier to get video data smoothly off a drive.
In a move that will come as a boon to netbook fans, Sata 3.0 will introduce a small low insertion force (LIF) connector for 1.8in hard drives.
So far, netbooks fitted with HDDs have either used relatively bulky, notebook-oriented 2.5in Sata drives or compact but slow 1.8in parallel ATA units. Sata 3.0 will make it possible to get the best of both worlds - fast data, small drive - into netbooks, making for lighter, thinner machines.
Laptops ditto, since the spec also introduces a connector design for skinnier, 7mm optical disk drives. ®
COMMENTS
Credit-card size earns points from me.
Never mind transfer speeds or encryption.. the biggest problem I have with small external storage is that I'm constantly losing it.
It's never a case of "grab the usb stick and go", it's always "spend 5 minutes finding the usb stick then go".
For someone like me this would be great as an addition to the wallet, always good to cut down on pocket clutter too.
RE: Will be too slow by the time that it is out.
As far as standard single SSD drives go (RAID is a different matter), the best SSD read speed top out at about 260MB/s but on average are 200MB/s so there is still room and 600MB/s is not to sniffed at for a storage device interface. If you really want faster throughput then other solutions already exist such as RAM drives but they are not cheap in the slightest. I have not even touched upon the fact that the fastest SSDs are still not affordable for normal consumers.
Have to agree with other comments that making a slimline dvd drive or 1.8" in sata version is not going to change the overall size of these components.
Will be too slow by the time that it is out.
If you look at the speed of the best SSD drives now, they are already saturating the 3gb/s SATA II bus and are well into SATA III territory already. By the time SATA III is out in volume 6gb/s will probably be too slow for the top-end SSD drives that will be on the market.
Time to think of something else.
So..............
A faster connection magically makes the drive smaller and faster??????
really?
Is the bus the speed-limiting factor, or is it the speed at which the platter(s) spin?
Are we really looking at netbooks with 6gb/s drive throughput?
If you're looking at external drives, I thought the sata 1.0 sockets were low insertion force...
Personally, I'd rather have an external PCIe connector and leave the rest up to the drive caddy. Then you could add a drive or a graphics card to your notebook.
