S-ATA 6Gbit/s HDDs and Motherboards Right Around the Corner

At IDF, there are many technologies floating about that are close to shipping, including S-ATA 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 6Gbit/s 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 GBit/s 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 6GBit/s is a good thing… faster bandwidth, lower latencies, and ultimately, better performance. Stay tuned… we have lots more to share in the coming weeks.