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Seagate launches world’s first SATA 6Gb/s drive

Robert Hallock September 21, 2009 11:58 PM ET in Tech

Though chief rival Western Digital was the first to strike the 2TB mark, Seagate has gone a step further to kick out the market’s first drive built to the new SATA spec.

The spritely mechanical disk uses four 500MB platters and 64MB of cache to peg sustained transfer rates at up to 138MB/s. That’s no slouch for a mechanical drive, but it sits comfortably in the 600MB/s offered by SATA 6Gb/s.

The drive will be available in about a week for the surprisingly reasonable MSRP of $299.

It's $19.95 for Saturn's rings.

It's $19.95 for Saturn's rings.

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10 Comments:

  1. fatcat
    sasquatch wannabe
    22 Sep '09, 12:02 am

    someday we will have actual 6Gb/s throughput, yes sir

  2. Robert Hallock
    Cad
    22 Sep '09, 12:09 am

    Give me 2 quick SSDs and I could easily give SATA6 some trouble.

  3. lordbean
    404 Brain Not Found
    22 Sep '09, 12:28 am

    I didn't even know there was a new SATA link format out.

  4. fatcat
    sasquatch wannabe
    22 Sep '09, 12:30 am
    Quoting Thrax

    Give me 2 quick SSDs and I could easily give SATA6 some trouble.

    750MB/s sustained transfer rate?

  5. Zuntar
    Modder extraordinaire
    22 Sep '09, 7:11 am

    Why oh why 2Tb. OS drives people.... fast, reasonably priced, smallish OS drives.

  6. Cliff_Forster
    Keepin it real
    22 Sep '09, 8:32 am

    I have to wonder if there will be any real world improvement?

  7. mas0n
    technosexual
    22 Sep '09, 9:07 am

    Data coming out of cache won't saturate 6Gb/s, but will be faster than 3Gb/s. I'd say there will definitely be some real world improvement, especially when we see 750GB and 1TB per platter in the near future.

  8. Robert Hallock
    Cad
    22 Sep '09, 10:01 am
    Quoting Zuntar

    Why oh why 2Tb. OS drives people.... fast, reasonably priced, smallish OS drives.

    Partitions?

  9. Zuntar
    Modder extraordinaire
    22 Sep '09, 12:35 pm

    I don't do partitions. I subscribe to Mt_goat's recommendation ( last paragraph ).

  10. Robert Hallock
    Cad
    22 Sep '09, 12:42 pm

    That recommendation only applies if the system is using the swap file, and even then the performance impact is negligible. Most common wisdom about mechanical disks falls apart in the presence of high memory capacity.

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