Seagate and AMD will be demonstrating the world’s first SATA 6Gbps hard-drive today, theoretically offering twice the throughput of the existing SATA 3Gbps standard. The demo will compare an existing Barracuda 7200.12 HDD and a SATA 6Gbps HDD that uses a prototype AMD chipset to offer 5.5Gigabits per second performance.
The companies are hoping to provoke interest in the new SATA 6Gbps standard, which will begin showing up in hard-drives before the end of 2009. It uses the same cables and connectors as previous 3Gbps and 1.5Gbps SATA, but introduces new power-efficiency technology among other things.

New drives will be backward compatible with motherboards that only support the existing SATA speeds, so we’re hoping to see them hit themarket sooner rather than later. No word from Seagate as to when a commercial version of the current prototype will be launched.

Press Release:

Seagate and AMD Unveil World’s First Demonstration of Serial ATA 6Gigabit/Second Technology for High-Speed PC Applications

Seagate (Nasdaq: STX), teaming with microprocessor manufacturing leader Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans this week, today unveiled the world’s first public demonstration of next-generation high-speed data transfer - Serial ATA 6Gigabit/second - for bandwidth-hungry desktop and laptop PC applications including gaming, streaming video and graphics multimedia.

The Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second storage interface will deliver the highest performance - burst speeds of up to 6Gigabits per second - for all PC applications, maintain backward compatibility with the SATA 3Gb/second and SATA 1.5Gb/second interfaces, and use the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration. The third generation of the mainstream storage interface for desktop and notebook computers also enhances power efficiency and improves Native Command Queuing, a SATA feature, to increase overall system performance and data transfer speeds of mainstream PC applications but especially applications with heavily transactional workloads such as scientific modeling and forecasting, and engineering design and simulation.

“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.”

“AMD strives to deliver platform technology that our technology partners can use to create high- performance desktop and laptop PCs,” said Leslie Sobon, vice president of Product Marketing, AMD. “The new SATA 6Gb/second technology not only incorporates the best features of previous SATA generations but also includes new enhancements. This innovation enables AMD to continue to evolve its technology platforms and to develop low-cost designs that our technology partners can use to improve their own PC and laptop products.”

The Seagate and AMD demonstration features two Seagate SATA disk drives - one a shipping Barracuda(R) 7200.12 3Gb/second hard drive and the other a prototype Barracuda 6Gb/second drive - in a desktop PC to show the performance difference between the two generations. The PC is powered by an AMD prototype SATA 6Gb/second chipset. The Seagate SATA 3Gb/second drive runs at more than 2.5Gigabits per second and the SATA 6Gb/second drive at 5.5Gigabits per second, with the performance of each storage interface displayed on the PC monitor.

Serial ATA 6Gb/second - Blazing speed for next-generation personal computing

Serial ATA (SATA), the mainstream storage interface for desktop and notebook disk drives, is currently available in two speeds - 3Gb/second and 1.5Gb/second. SATA 6Gb/second was developed by the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) under the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specification.

In keeping with SATA-IO objectives for designing a low-cost interface for desktop and notebook PCs, SATA 6Gb/second maintains the low cost and low-power design requirements of previous SATA generations, and is designed to be backward compatible with SATA 3Gb/second connectors, cables and other hardware.

Solidata recently started offering new P2 2.5-inch solid-state drives that come with an IDE interface. These drives are perfect for owners of older machines that do not support SATA ports, or just people that prefer the old 80-pin IDE cables over the new SATA ones. The firm is currently offering 32 GB and 64 GB versions of the IDE SSDs. The P2 drives use MLC SSD witha maximum read speed of 90 MB/sec, and maximum write speed of 70 MB/sec. The power consumption of these drives is 0.24 W at standby while the peak consumption is 0.5 W. Dimensions are standard at 100 x 70 x 9.5 mm (width x depth x height) and the drives weight exactly 75 g.

Due to show up at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in 2009, the new HP Firebird 803 designed by Voodoo has surfaced early with leaked photos and specifications. Unlike the previous firebird, this design is much smaller, however it does come with its draw backs. To get such a small design, the entire unit is custom built and appears to follow no standard layout or format, i.e ATX, BTX, etc. As such one would imagine that upgrading components would be very limited, so this is more likea laptop or games console in which what you buy is what your stuck with. The tower also appears to be watercooled, but to further reduce the size and heat output, the power supply has been made external and judging by the pictures it's roughly twice the size of a normal laptop power supply.
Specifications:

* NVIDIA nForce 760i SLI chipset
* Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz processor
* 4GB of RAM
* Dual NVIDIA GeForce 9800S cards
* Two 320GB SATA drives
* Blu-ray
* 5-in-1 card reader
* 6 USB, 1 FireWire, 2 eSATA, 1 S/PDIF and 1 DVI dual-link
* Bluetooth
* 802.11n WiFi