Seagate & AMD Unveil New High Bandwidth HDD SATA Technology

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Seagate and AMD have demonstrated their new high-speed SATA technology which offers burst data transfer speeds of up to an impressive 6 Gigabits per second and which will be aimed specifically at bandwidth-hungry desktop and laptop PC applications including gaming, streaming video and graphics multimedia applications.

The first public demonstration of the new high bandwidth SATA technology featured a Barracuda 7200 3Gb/second HHD and a new, prototype Barracuda 6Gb/second drive utilising the new high bandwidth technology allowing the relative performance of both HDDs to be compared. In the consequent test, whilst the standard 3Gb/second Barracuda managed a sustained data transfer rate, the prototype Barracuda 6Gb/second drive managed to put in a sustained 5.5GB/s (the maximum 6GB/s being attainable in burst transfers only).

“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 6Gb/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 6Gb/second storage.”

There’s no word from either AMD or Seagate at this stage detailing quite when the new high bandwidth SATA technology will become available in consumer HDD units but, as impressive as the figures are, we cannot help but wonder quite whether, with the ever growing uptake of SSD units, this new technology is going to impact negatively (positively for Seagate) in any way on the inroads being made by solid state drives. Moreover, certainly as far as laptops/notebooks (and other mobile computing solutions) are concerned, the HDD as we know it is never going to offer the durability offered by SSDs – on account of SSDs having now moving parts, and therefore circumventing wear and tear based drives failures.

Still we have to have it to AMD and Seagate, as the HDD market is by no means dead (quite the contrary) and its good to see them coming out fighting for the format and its future (which, ultimately, in the fullness of time, is undoubtedly bleak as SSD capacities rise and prices drop).

[via Press]