Intel is coming out with their new 510 Series SSDs. These Marvell-controlled flash storage drives will transfer your data to your processing unit at a rate of 500MB per second and write anything you send back at a rate of 315MBps. The 510 consumer drive SSD comes with a 6Gbps SATA interface, which has removed a bottleneck from the performance of these types of drives. When bought in bulk, a 250GB SSD 510 will cost you $584, while the smaller 120GB model which is a little slower (450MBps read, 210MBps write) will set you back $284. Pretty steep compared to standard spinning drives, but in time the price will come down so that all computers with have SSD drives.

• Intel 510 Series 120 GB SATA Version 3 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive
• List Price: $332.00
• Price: $180.00
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AMD and Seagate are collaborating on a new hard drive with a Serial ATA (SATA) interface, tentatively called SATA3. SATA3 offers speeds up to 6Gbps, or 600MBps.

(SATA3, or SATA 6GB/second, was developed by the Serial ATA International Organization under the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specs.)

In the current market most consumer-grade computers use either the SATA or SATA2 interfaces. These interfaces offer throughput speeds of 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps, respectively, or 150MBps and 300MBps. Because of software and hardware overhead, the actual speed of most SATA hard drives is still less than 200MBps.

The new SATA3 interface will raise the top throughput of hard drive speeds by 200 percent which will hopefully increase the actual transfer speed of hard drives accordingly.

The new SATA3 interface will be backward compatible with the existing SATA and SATA2 interfaces and will share the same cables and connectors. SATA3 enhances power efficiency and improves native command queuing, an inherent features of SATA standard, to increase overall system performance and data transfer speeds.

SATA3 is still in the final phase of development and there aren’t any actual products out yet. AMD said it would fully support the technology with a revision of its current 750 chipset and future chipsets.

Seagate estimates however that the first SATA3-based hard drive will be by the end of the year.

Via:Seagate

I may pickup a few of these for my Netgear NAS Box.

Specifications
Capacity (GB): 1000
Interface: SATA 3.0Gb/s
Spindle Speed (RPM): 7200
Buffer Memory: 16MB
Data Transfer Rate on Serial ATA: Up to 3000 Mb/sec

Deal Price: $89.99

IDE Cable

Parallel ATA (EIDE and IDE) standard cables are for internal computer storage devices. For many years ATA provided the most common and the least expensive interface for hooking up drives. By the beginning of 2007 (EIDE and IDE) are largely been replaced by Serial ATA (SATA) in new systems.

Sata Cable

First-generation SATA interfaces, also known as SATA/150 or unofficially as SATA 1, communicate at a rate of 1.5 gigabits per second (Gbit/s). First-generation SATA devices operated at best a little faster than parallel ATA/133 ide devices.

Given the importance of backward compatibility between SATA 1.5 Gbit/s controllers and SATA 3.0 Gbit/s devices, SATA/300′s autonegotiation sequence is designed to fall back to SATA/150 speed (1.5 Gbit/s rate) when in communication with such devices.

eSATA Cable

Maximum cable length for eSATA is 2 meters. SATA offers advantages over the older parallel ATA interface: primarily faster data transfer, the ability to remove or add devices while operating (hot swapping) (only when the operating system supports it), and thinner cables that let air-cooling work more efficiently.