Seagate and AMD today unveiled world’s first public demonstration of next generation high-speed data transfer –Serial ATA 6Gigabit/second hard drive. The new SATA 6Gbps storage interface will deliver the highest performance burst speeds of up to 6Gbps, while maintaining backward compatibility with SATA 3Gbps and SATA 1.5Gbps interfaces.

“The increasing reliance of consumers and businesses worldwide on digital information is giving rise to gaming, digital video and audio, streaming video, graphics and other applications that require even more bandwidth, driving demand for PC interfaces that can carry even more digital content,” said Joan Motsinger, Seagate vice president of Personal Systems Marketing and Strategy. “The SATA 6Gb/second storage interface will meet this demand for higher-bandwidth PCs. Seagate has a long history of being first to market with new technologies such as Serial ATA, perpendicular recording and self-encrypting drives, and is pleased to be teaming with AMD to stage the world’s first public demonstration of SATA 6Gb/second storage.”

The Seagate and AMD demonstration features two Seagate SATA disk drives - one a shipping Barracuda 7200.12 3Gbps hard drive and the other a prototype Barracuda 6Gbps drive - in a desktop PC to show the performance difference between the two generations. The PC is powered by an AMD prototype SATA 6Gbps chipset. The Seagate SATA 3Gbps drive runs at more than 2.5Gbps and the SATA 6Gbps drive at 5.5Gbps, with the performance of each storage interface displayed on the PC monitor.

The SATA 6Gbps interface based hard drives for desktops will start shipping by end of 2009. Laptop variant should come to market in 2010.