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There hasn’t been a whole lot of improvements in hard drive technology in the past few years aside from increasing capacities.  Sure, there’s the advent of the SSD, but it’s still way too expensive for most people.  For the most part we’ve been using SATA 2 connections with upwards of 1TB drives.  It’s about time we get around to SATA 3.

Turns out, Seagate, partnering with AMD, is actually getting around to SATA 3.  At the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans, Seagate’s been showing off its newest HDDs running on SATA 3, which it plans to have out by the end of the year.  The big improvement is in transfer speeds SATA 3 can handle burst transfer speeds of 6 GBps (that’s Gigabits per second), compared to SATA 2’s 3 GBps.  For steady transfers, SATA 3 can handle 600 Mbps which is nothing to laugh at.

The one depressing part of the new SATA 3 drive Seagate was showing off, is that it requires a chipset capable of handling it.  So, if you need the 6 GBps burst speeds, you’ll need to upgrade the whole machine along with the hard drive.  It is backwards compatible with SATA and SATA 2, though as it uses the same cables.  The steady stream transfer rate is about comparable to the Z drive that OCZ was showing off at CeBIT, so even though SSD might be the way of the future, it seems HDDs still have some life in them and will continue to compete with the more expensive SSDs.

Read [Electronista]