SATA Revision 3.0 Specs Released

The Serial ATA International Organization today released the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 Specification.

Speed is becoming critical for today's storage solutions, and SATA-IO proves its leadership in this space with its Serial ATA Revision 3.0 Specification. SATA Revision 3.0 enables 6Gb/s link speeds between storage units, disk drives, optical and tape drives and protocol host bus adaptors (HBAs).

SATA 6Gb/s promises new levels of performance for networks. This specification is backward compatible with earlier SATA Implementations 1.5 and 3Gb/s. This specification maintains the low cost and low power for which SATA is acclaimed.

The SATA Revision 3.0 Specification enhancements include:

-- A new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command to enable isochronous data transfers for bandwidth-hungry audio and video 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 7mm optical disk drives for thinner and lighter notebooks

-- Alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standardSerial ATA (SATA) is the primary internal storage interconnect for desktop and mobile PCs. It connects the host system to peripherals such as hard drives, solid state drives, optical drives, and removable magnetic media devices.