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Sata spec update to yield faster, thinner netbooks

Sata 3.0 ups peak speed to 6Gb/s too

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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. ®

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Latest 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.

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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.

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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.

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