SATA Revision 3.0 (SATA 6 Gb/s)

 

- The full 3.0 standard (peak throughput about 600 MB/s ( 10b/8b coding plus 8 bit to one byte, without the protocol, or encoding overhead) While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth, Solid-State Drives have already saturated the SATA 3 Gbit/s limit at 250 MB/s net read speed. Ten channels of fast flash can reach well over 500 MB/s with new ONFI drives, so a move from SATA 3 Gbit/s to SATA 6 Gbit/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.
 
Specification contains the following changes:
 
6 Gb/s for scalable performance when used with SSDs
Continued compatibility with SAS, including SAS 6Gb/s. A SAS domain may support attachment to and control of unmodified SATA devices connected directly into the SAS domain using the Serial ATA Tunneled Protocol (STP) from the SATA_Revision 3.0 Gold specification.
Isochronous Streaming command Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command to enable isochronous quality of service data transfers for streaming digitial content applications.
An NCQ Management feature that helps optimize 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 7 mm optical disk drives for thinner and lighter notebooks.
Alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standard.
In general, the enhancements are aimed at improving quality of service for video streaming and high-priority interrupts. In addition, the standard continues to support distances up to a meter. The new speeds may require higher power consumption for supporting chips, factors that new process technologies and power management techniques are expected to mitigate. The new specification can use existing SATA cables and connectors, although some OEMs are expected to upgrade host connectors for the higher speeds. Also, the new standard is backwards compatible with SATA 3 Gbit/s