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AMD and Seagate will demonstrate a next-generation 6-Gbit/s SATA interface Monday in New Orleans, the companies said.

Neither company is announcing products based on the technology yet, Seagate executives said. The 6-Gbit/s SATA technology will be part of a future AMD south bridge chip, and may appear in solid-state-disc drives before it becomes part of a conventional hard drive.

The target markets will be gaming PCs and servers, executives said.

Currently, SATA uses a 3.0-Gbit/s interface, which should satisfy the throughput requirements of hard drives until 2011, when that channel will become saturated and the 6.0-Gbit/s interface will truly be needed. But the SATA-IO Working Group and the industry has traditionally built in enough overhead into the interface to allow the industry time to prepare, said Marc Noblitt, senior marketing I/O development manager for Seagate.

On a rotating drive, the optimum location for storing data is on the outside tracks, where the throughput is highest as the disk spins. But that data rate will reach 250 Mbytes/s in 2011, saturating the current 3-Gbits/s channel. “You always want to keep the I/O spec in front of the data rate to ensure you don’t run up against it,” Noblitt said.

Although Seagate was founded on rotating disk-drive technology, OEMs have told Seagate that the 6-Gbit/s interface is needed for flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) which stream data instantly from flash memory.

“Flash will take advantage [of the new interface], in applicable markets, sooner than you think,” Noblitt said. “Six-gig is a perfect interface. OEMs tell us that they want to have the same SATA interface for flash as for a 1.8-inch rotating drive, so they can swap in a drive for flash, or vice versa.”

The 6.0-Gbit/s also contains improved streaming characteristics that 3.0-Gbit/s drives with Native Command Queuing lacked, Noblitt said. In addition, a new power management spec allows the always-on SATA interface to power on and off, like older Parallel ATA drives, he said.

The 6.0-Gbit/s portion of the External SATA specification is not yet complete, Noblitt said.