Technical Reviews and Geek Toys

Serial ATA (SATA) is the primary internal storage interconnect for desktop and mobile PCs. It connects the host system to peripherals such as hard drives, solid state drives, optical drives, and removable magnetic media devices.

On May 27, 2009 Serial ATA International Organization released the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 Specification which increases the throughput of Serial ATA devices from 3 to 6Gb/s. This increase will eliminate storage as a system bottleneck as data can be transfered in half the time it use to require. With the increasing availability of commercial content, and the increased usage of personal digital photos, videos, music, and other data files, storage interfaces are being pushed to their limit which causes a bottleneck (system wide slowdown). SATA Rev 3.0 will provide end-users with the speed they crave, without compromising the quality and performance they’ve come to expect from SATA technology.

Follow up:

Revising a specification typically requires a redesign of system hardware which means the end-user is not able to take advantage of the benefits of the new revision until new hardware can be redesigned and brought to market. In the design of the SATA Revision 3.0 specification the designers key goal was to make the revision backwards compatible with the SATA Revision 1.5 standard. Therefore SATA 6Gb/s devices are able to utilize the same connectors and cables as SATA 3Gb/s devices.

One of the major market needs SATA 6Gb/s addresses is the throughput bottleneck facing solid state drives (SSDs). SSDs provide faster data access and are more robust and reliable than standard HDDs because they do not incur the latency associated with rotating media. SSDs are used in a variety of applications but one of the most exciting is two-tier, hybrid drive systems for PCs. The SSD serves as short-term and immediate storage, leveraging its lower latency to speed boot time
and disk heap access while a HDD, with its lower cost per MB, provides efficient long-term storage. With SATA 3Gb/s, SSDs are already approaching the performance wall with sustained throughput rates of 250-260 MB/s. Next-generation SSDs are expected to require 6Gb/s connectivity to allow networks to take full advantage of the higher levels of throughput these devices can achieve.

Other features introduced in the SATA Rev. 3.0 standard include:

• A new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command to enable isochronous data transfers for bandwidth-hungry environments
• An NCQ Management feature that optimizes performance by enabling host processing and management of outstanding NCQ commands
• Improved power management capabilities
• A small Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for more compact 1.8-inch storage devices
• A connector designed to accommodate 7mm optical disk drives for thinner and lighter notebooks

Recently SATA-IO introduced a a Certified Logo Program to enhance its Interoperability Program. Certified devices have undergone extensive testing for specification compliance, thereby assuring a high level of interoperability with other certified devices. Devices that pass SATA-IO interoperability testing are authorized to bear the SATA certified logos, indicating adherence to the SATA specifications. Certified logos enable manufacturers and end-users to quickly and
easily identify SATA certified products.

In the transition to SATA 6Gb/s, it will be important to use high-quality cabling. Problems may be related to the use of cables made from marginal materials that
perform at the edges of SATA 3Gb/s tolerances, which could become a failure point at the faster 6Gb/s signal rates. SATA-IO therefore recommends that only high quality cables and connectors be utilized for SATA 6Gb/s.