Seagate and AMD show off 6Gbps SATA drives

The drives use a new version of the SATA interface to hit the performance standard. Current SATA hardware is limited to speeds of 3Gb per second.

The companies plan to bring the first drives to market by the end of the calendar year. When it becomes available, the new SATA interface will be used for both disk-based and solid-state hard drives.

Seagate initially plans to target the new interface for high-end markets and gaming enthusiasts which are most effected by what the company sees as an increasingly important bottleneck in the hard drive interface.

As both disk and solid-state drives become larger and systems become more powerful, the current SATA system will increasingly be a drag on system performance, the company argued.

"Interface speeds aren’t keeping up with capacity. It’s taking longer and longer to fill and empty a SATA drive," wrote Pete Steege, a global segment manager for Seagate.

"Anything that can be done to speed up the flow is valuable."