Rumor Mill – Call it SATA 6G not SATA 3.0
Rumors are flying around today that AMD will have chipsets support SATA 3.0 in the second half of 2009. This will be the platform after Dragon and the Dragon platform will not be out till early 2009, so this is very far off. The platform after Dragon is rumored to be Leo, so with Leo will come support for SATA 6G thanks to RD890 and RS880D chipsets. It’s really not called SATA 3.0, so I figured I’d help clear up the air now that SATA 6G is getting some more media exposure. Rumors have been floating around about SATA 6G since 2006, but finally we are seeing some launch rumors.
SATA-IO presented the draft specification of 6 Gbit/s physical layer in July 2008, and ratified its physical layer specification on August 18, 2008. The full 3.0 standard is expected to be available in early 2009. While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth, Intel’s Solid State Disk drives are close to saturating the SATA 3 Gb/s limit at 250 MB/s net read speed, and other new drives including Super Talent and Samsung are close to that as well. Ten channels of fast flash can actually reach well over 500 MB/s with new ONFI drives, so a move from SATA 3 Gb/s to SATA 6 Gb/s would benefit the flash read speeds. As for the standard hard disks, the reads from their built-in DRAM cache will end up faster across the new interface.
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