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

Robert Hallock 21 Sep, 2009 at 11:58pm ET Article published 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.

Comments

22 Sep 2009 ~ 12:02am fatcat someday we will have actual 6Gb/s throughput, yes sir
22 Sep 2009 ~ 12:09am Thrax Give me 2 quick SSDs and I could easily give SATA6 some trouble.
22 Sep 2009 ~ 12:28am lordbean I didn't even know there was a new SATA link format out.
22 Sep 2009 ~ 12:30am fatcat

Thrax wrote:

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

750MB/s sustained transfer rate?
22 Sep 2009 ~ 7:11am Zuntar Why oh why 2Tb. OS drives people.... fast, reasonably priced, smallish OS drives.
22 Sep 2009 ~ 8:32am Cliff_Forster I have to wonder if there will be any real world improvement?
22 Sep 2009 ~ 9:07am mas0n 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.
22 Sep 2009 ~ 10:01am Thrax

Zuntar wrote:

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

Partitions?
22 Sep 2009 ~ 12:35pm Zuntar I don't do partitions. I subscribe to Mt_goat's recommendation ( last paragraph ).;)
22 Sep 2009 ~ 12:42pm Thrax 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.