How fast of the latest hard drive Serial ATA (SATA) interface can offer? The world’s largest manufacturer of hard drives and storage solutions, Seagate, has collaborated with the microprocessor manufacturing leader Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at the Everything Channel Xchange Conference to demo and present to the public the superb performance of latest SATA3 which can offers speed up to 6Gbps or 600MBps, almost double the speed of current SATA or SATA2.

The new SATA3 (or SATA 6Gb/second) was developed by the Serial ATA International Organization under the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specifications. This high performance interface is good for bandwidth-hungry desktop and laptop PC applications including gaming, streaming video and graphics multimedia. Seagate has highlighted in its statement the new SATA3 will be backward compatible with the existing SATA and SATA2 interfaces and it share the same cables and connectors. SATA3 enhances power efficiency, improves Native Command Queuing, a SATA feature, increase overall system performance and data transfer speeds.

SATA3 will be practically useful for bandwidth-hungry desktop and laptop PC applications including gaming, streaming video and graphics multimedia. Seagate reveals that this new SATA3 is in the final phase of development and users can only expect the first SATA3-based hard drive by the end of the year.