From our front-page news:
At IDF, there are many technologies floating about that are close to shipping, including S-ATA 3 (6 Gbit/s). On the show floor is Marvell, showing off their latest controller for upcoming S-ATA 6 Gbit/s drives, along with an ASUS P7DP55D Premium motherboard, which will launch with a few such ports on the board. To show overall performance, Marvell also had a prototype S-ATA 6 SSD on-hand (the company only sells the controllers, not SSDs as a whole).
You can see below the test machine that was set up. You can't see it from this view, but a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 2TB drive was settled in behind, and it was what was hooked up to the latest S-ATA 6 port. We have both this particular board and drive en route, so you can expect some in-depth reports soon.
Curious about performance? As you can see in the screenshot below, with HD Tach RW3, the drive hit near 400MB/s burst, 180MB/s average read (!) and a low random access time of 5.5ms. I'm not entirely confident that this wasn't a RAID setup, but I was told it wasn't. However, 180MB/s read is a little (lot) higher than I would have expected. We'll get to the nitty gritty in the coming weeks when we can get down to our own testing.
As S-ATA 6Gbit/s boards launch, it's unlikely that every port on any particular model will support it. Rather, companies are likely to start off small, and devote 2 ports to the new tech, and make them all S-ATA 6 across the board on really high-end boards. S-ATA 6 is a good thing... faster bandwidth, lower latencies, and ultimately, better performance. Stay tuned... we have lots more to share in the coming weeks.
You can see below the test machine that was set up. You can't see it from this view, but a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 2TB drive was settled in behind, and it was what was hooked up to the latest S-ATA 6 port. We have both this particular board and drive en route, so you can expect some in-depth reports soon.
Curious about performance? As you can see in the screenshot below, with HD Tach RW3, the drive hit near 400MB/s burst, 180MB/s average read (!) and a low random access time of 5.5ms. I'm not entirely confident that this wasn't a RAID setup, but I was told it wasn't. However, 180MB/s read is a little (lot) higher than I would have expected. We'll get to the nitty gritty in the coming weeks when we can get down to our own testing.
As S-ATA 6Gbit/s boards launch, it's unlikely that every port on any particular model will support it. Rather, companies are likely to start off small, and devote 2 ports to the new tech, and make them all S-ATA 6 across the board on really high-end boards. S-ATA 6 is a good thing... faster bandwidth, lower latencies, and ultimately, better performance. Stay tuned... we have lots more to share in the coming weeks.
