Seagate, AMD Show Blazing Fast SATA 3

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garydale

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While some people tout this as being great for SSDs, and it probably is, it appears that it will also give HD manufacturers some incentive to come out with faster drives. While the drives currently are running nowhere near their peak throughput, they do hit it sometimes. SATA-3 appears to give them enough headroom for future growth.
 
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While SATA 3 chugs along at decent pace where is my non-draft 802.11n?! :(
 

hellwig

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I think the fact that WD's Raptor line stuck with SATA 1.0 until the Velociraptor last year shows that in general, the world doesn't need faster SATA. If the fastest harddrive for 2 years never needed 3.0Gbps, how long until we need 6Gbps?

This is probably just a ploy to prevent people from switching to USB 3.0. 5Gpbs? That's nothing compared to our 6Gpbs, so please, don't switch your harddrives over to USB 3.0. Pretty please?
 

nekatreven

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[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]I think the fact that WD's Raptor line stuck with SATA 1.0 until the Velociraptor last year shows that in general, the world doesn't need faster SATA. If the fastest harddrive for 2 years never needed 3.0Gbps, how long until we need 6Gbps? This is probably just a ploy to prevent people from switching to USB 3.0. 5Gpbs? That's nothing compared to our 6Gpbs, so please, don't switch your harddrives over to USB 3.0. Pretty please?[/citation]

I'd have to agree with that second part. Although, SATA port management and boot configuration tends to be a little better integrated into the bios on most systems, so that may also deter an all-out switch to usb. I'd always thought usb was more stressing on the cpu anyway. Then again there is still the point that there aren't that many mainstream parts that could take advantage of 6.0 or even 5.0gbps. I do disagree there though...I don't think it will be so long until we do have affordable parts that are that fast.
 

MoUsE-WiZ

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[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]If the fastest harddrive for 2 years never needed 3.0Gbps, how long until we need 6Gbps?[/citation]
Why do you think OCZ is connecting the Z drive directly to a PCIe slot instead of sticking with SATA interface? It's because their forums are full of people hitting a bottle kneck with 3Gbps SATA with very obvious potential to bottle kneck at 6Gbps in the not very far future.
 

foxman

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Please don't call this SATA 3. There is nothing like SATA 3. The correct name is SATA 6 Gbit/s. Now everyone is confused with the nomentaclature, where you don't know if someone talking about SATA 3 is taking about SATA 3 Gbit/s or SATA 6 Gbit/s. I HATE ALL OF YOU!!! ;)

And 6 Gbit/s is per SATA link and not as whole, loneeagle.
 

IzzyCraft

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[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]I think the fact that WD's Raptor line stuck with SATA 1.0 until the Velociraptor last year shows that in general, the world doesn't need faster SATA. If the fastest harddrive for 2 years never needed 3.0Gbps, how long until we need 6Gbps? This is probably just a ploy to prevent people from switching to USB 3.0. 5Gpbs? That's nothing compared to our 6Gpbs, so please, don't switch your harddrives over to USB 3.0. Pretty please?[/citation]
Maybe i am wrong but those drives just before last year where being beat in throughput in and out the main benefit of the drives in being fast was low seek time which makes fragmented data transfers alot faster in competing hard drives. Which is why i buy seagate over WD due to their drives at 7200 has better random seek times then wd
 

hellwig

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[citation][nom]IzzyCraft[/nom]Maybe i am wrong but those drives just before last year where being beat in throughput in and out the main benefit of the drives in being fast was low seek time which makes fragmented data transfers alot faster in competing hard drives. Which is why i buy seagate over WD due to their drives at 7200 has better random seek times then wd[/citation]
I meant that in their time, the Raptors were fastest for a couple years, not the last couple years. Yes, they were beat by conventional drives later in their life.
 

hellwig

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[citation][nom]MoUsE-WiZ[/nom]Why do you think OCZ is connecting the Z drive directly to a PCIe slot instead of sticking with SATA interface? It's because their forums are full of people hitting a bottle kneck with 3Gbps SATA with very obvious potential to bottle kneck at 6Gbps in the not very far future.[/citation]
Mouse-Wiz, OCZ is connecting a SATA RAID controller to PCIe. That new PCIe card is 4 SSD drives in RAID configuration, with a RAID controller inside. Each individual drive still uses only a regular SATA 3Gbps connection. Therefore, no individual drive needs more than the 3Gbps.

You might be thinking of that new Fusion ioDrive, which is such a specialized and expensive piece of hardware, I wouldn't count on it moving the mass storage market forward any time soon.
 

Master Exon

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[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]I think the fact that WD's Raptor line stuck with SATA 1.0 until the Velociraptor last year shows that in general, the world doesn't need faster SATA. If the fastest harddrive for 2 years never needed 3.0Gbps, how long until we need 6Gbps? This is probably just a ploy to prevent people from switching to USB 3.0. 5Gpbs? That's nothing compared to our 6Gpbs, so please, don't switch your harddrives over to USB 3.0. Pretty please?[/citation]

We don't need conspiracy theories on the subject. USB3 and SATAIII have been in the works for quite a while. Both have their own separate specializations.
 

Tindytim

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I find this rather silly.

They double the speed, then demo a drive that can max it out? The technology should give us improvements that we won't immediately max out.
 

duzcizgi

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[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]I think the fact that WD's Raptor line stuck with SATA 1.0 until the Velociraptor last year shows that in general, the world doesn't need faster SATA. If the fastest harddrive for 2 years never needed 3.0Gbps, how long until we need 6Gbps? This is probably just a ploy to prevent people from switching to USB 3.0. 5Gpbs? That's nothing compared to our 6Gpbs, so please, don't switch your harddrives over to USB 3.0. Pretty please?[/citation]

No need for conspiracy, hellwig. USB performance is tightly dependent to the performance of the CPU. It's a host controlled system and a high performance USB device can easily get an i7 to its knees very easily.
So, USB III, although promises 5Gbit/second, it's very unlikely to achieve that performance with current systems.
 

bumskins

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[citation][nom]bumskins[/nom]I call total bullshit on the hard drive speed. Thats not a sustained hard drive speed.[/citation]

I should of been more specific, I doubt that the hard drive got that performance. And that's the thing, these speed increases aren't to cater for single devices but rather external raid, etc.
 

hellwig

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[citation][nom]duzcizgi[/nomIt's a host controlled system and a high performance USB device can easily get an i7 to its knees very easily.[/citation]
Woah, now who's starting conspiracy theories. USB3.0 will cripple your Core i7? Unlikely, how would they even develop a technology no standard computer is capable of running?

All I'm saying is, USB3.0 was introduced September, 2007. SATA 6Gbps wasn't introduced until July, 2008. Now SATA is going to possibly beat USB3 into the market? I know USB is slacking here, but I think USB3.0 vs. SATA 6Gbps is less conspiracy than USB3.0 being designed to cripple your computer.
 

duzcizgi

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@hellwig:
Well, USB is a host controlled system which doesn't support DMA since USB 1.0. It's cheap and each data transfer needs CPU attention.
Try to make a 5Gbit/sec memcopy using CPU and see the CPU utilization. No conspiracy here. By design USB is cheap and doesn't support DMA. Even USB 2.0 480 Mbit/sec translates to approx. 20 MB/sec ~= 200Mbit/sec of data transfer with today's highest end systems. I want to see how they can sustain 5 Gbit/sec, when they can't handle 0.48 Gbit/sec yet.
On the other hand, ATA, PATA, SATA has UDMA mode, which offloads CPU from data transfer, where you can get as much as interface bandwith permits.
 

Tindytim

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[citation][nom]bumskins[/nom]And that's the thing, these speed increases aren't to cater for single devices but rather external raid, etc.[/citation]
Then these speeds are even more retarded. A single SSD can almost max out SATA 3GB. Doubling it just means they'll get to charge us more in a few years because they didn't think far enough ahead (or is this intentional?).
 

martin0642

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I think using an unspecified "drive" which is already near 600MBps to showcase is kind of lame as it basically proves we have no headroom and that the new standard is obsolete even with today's tech.

I want a standard for PCIe booting to enable each motherboard manufacturer to integrate FusionIO style local storage onto mainboards. A motherboard that comes with a 128GB 600MBps integrated SSD for the boot drive would be awesome, even more so if said drive was upgradeable/removable like the newer laptop video cards. Less wires and case mess and more speed and better power efficiency.

Soon we'll need dual x32 lanes for local storage, and I couldn't be happier.

When SSDs mature, we're going to enter into an age of computing where there aren't any moving parts and most users won't be able to tell if a PC is new or 6 years old because the speed of response will already be orders of magnitude faster than what we can register. Only certain types of games, movie rendering, and math/science type calculations will really push a system.
 

freak77power

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They should have dedicated CPU to handle USB, SATA traffic. Also they need to get rid of old ATA100/133 interface as well as PCI slots.
 
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