SATA-III moves at an unchanged pace.
Since the introduction of the original SATA standard quite a few years ago, PC components have experienced huge increases in both ease of use (no fiddly master/slave headers) as well as performance increases when compared to IDE (133MB/s theoretical max vs. SATA II's 3Gbit/s).
With the recent release of both the ASUS P7P55D-E Premium motherboard, running a Marvell 88SE9123-NAA2 chip, and the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB HDD, the time has finally come for SATA III. It boasts the same physical interface, the same cables and demands the same power envelope, so what has changed?
Apart from a sheer doubling of the speed to 6Gbit/s, SATA-III also offers a completely redesigned Native Command Queuing (NCQ) algorithm that manages the writing of data to the discs within. These are the only real changes to the standard, so we threw the Seagate Barracuda XT into the ASUS mobo to see what kind of performance gains we could eke out.
As shown in the images above and summarised in the table, SATA-III brings a slightly faster Burst Speed with minutely reduced Random Access times. This set of results is close enough for the difference to be ruled out as standard variable performance, and they're practically identical.
What this boils down to is that while SATA-III might be a technically faster and more capable standard, but until we get flash-based storage media such as SSDs becoming more mainstream there's no benefit in performance to our current-gen mechanical media.
Any performance difference in these large-capacity HDDs in the future will come mainly from the addition of smarter cache and higher data densities; placing the importance of SATA-III squarely on SSDs.
So for now you might see motherboard manufacturers listing SATA-III as an ultrapremium feature - and until SSDs catch up to the mainstream market, that's exactly where the feature will stay.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012