A faster hard drive is on the way from Seagate, which demonstrated its abilities publicly for the first time today.
With chipset supplies from AMD, the drive reached almost double the speed of today's typical 3 Gbps drives, Betanews reports. After accounting for hardware and software overhead, the drive managed 5.5 Gbps throughput, compared to 2.5 Gbps for a current high-end drive.
Seagate's 6Gbps drive will be among the first to use the SATA 3.0 standard, which was unveiled last year. In addition to the faster transfer rates, the new SATA standard supports better data streaming and power management. Today's tech demo wasn't tied to any actual product announcements, and Seagate doesn't expect to release a SATA 3 drive until the end of the year.
While the average consumer won't find much use in the faster drives by then, Seagate expects some demand for high-end gaming machines and low-end servers. But like most computer hardware, premium hard drives eventually trickle down to the masses. The 6 Gbps SATA standard should be in the mainstream by 2011, says Betanews.
It's always fun to compare the latest hard drive developments with solid state. Currently, the fastest SSD on the market is Texas Memory Systems' RamSan-440, which features 4.5 Gbps random read and write speeds. Unfortunately, it costs $150,000 for the 256 GB model.
It's not clear how much the faster SATA drives will cost out of the gate.
