Storage solutions leader Seagate and microprocessor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) held the first public demonstration of next-generation high-speed data transfer technology.

The event took place recently at the Everything Channel Xchange conference in New Orleans, US.

The high-speed data transfer – Serial ATA 6Gigabit/second is ideal for bandwidth-hungry desktop and laptop PC applications including gaming, streaming video and graphics multimedia, according to a company official.

The Serial ATA (Sata) 6 gigabits (Gb) per second storage interface will deliver the highest performance – burst speeds of up to 6 Gb per second – for all PC applications, maintain backward compatibility with the Sata 3 Gb per second and Sata 1.5 Gb per second interfaces, and use the same cables and connectors as previous Sata generations to ease integration.

“The increasing reliance of consumers and businesses worldwide on digital information is giving rise to gaming, digital video and audio, streaming video, graphics and other applications that require even more bandwidth, driving demand for PC interfaces that can carry even more digital content,” said Joan Motsinger, Seagate vice president of personal systems marketing and strategy.

“The Sata 6 Gb per second storage interface will meet this demand for higher-bandwidth PCs. Seagate has a long history of being first to market with new technologies such as Serial ATA, perpendicular recording and self-encrypting drives, and is pleased to be teaming with AMD to stage the world’s first public demonstration of Sata 6 Gb per second storage,” she added.

“AMD strives to deliver platform technology that our technology partners can use to create high- performance desktop and laptop PCs,” said Leslie Sobon, vice president of product marketing, AMD.

The third generation of the mainstream storage interface for desktop and notebook computers also enhances power efficiency and improves native command queuing, a Sata feature, to increase overall system performance and data transfer speeds of mainstream PC applications, she added.

She pointed out that the system helped in improving the efficiency of applications with heavy transactional workloads such as scientific modeling and forecasting, engineering design and simulation.

The Seagate and AMD demonstration features two Seagate Sata disk drives – one a shipping Barracuda 7200.12 3Gb per second hard drive and the other a prototype Barracuda 6 Gb per second drive – in a desktop PC to show the performance difference between the two generations.

The PC is powered by an AMD prototype Sata 6 Gb per second chipset. The Seagate Sata 3 Gb per second drive runs at more than 2.5 Gb per second and the Sata 6 Gb per second drive at 5.5 Gb per second, with the performance of each storage interface displayed on the PC monitor.

Sata 6 Gb per second is currently available in two speeds – 3 Gb per second and 1.5 Gb per second. Sata 6 Gb per second was developed by the Serial ATA International Organization (Sata-IO) under the Serial ATA revision 3.0 specification.

In keeping with Sata-IO objectives for designing a low-cost interface for desktop and notebook PCs, Sata 6 Gb per second maintains the low cost and low-power design requirements of previous Sata generations, and is designed to be backward compatible with Sata 3 Gb per second connectors, cables and other hardware. – TradeArabia News Service