
SATA 3.0 Released, Solid-State Drives Rejoice - vaksel
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20090528/tc_pcworld/sata30releasedsolidstatedrivesrejoice
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pmjordan
I can't seem to find info on this, but it doesn't look like the "trim" ATA
command made it into this spec, which is a bit of a shame. This would allow
the OS (well, the file system or some smart block layer) to mark regions of
the device to be discarded, which would help avoid constantly copying data
between banks in SSDs.

Apparently, Win7 has support for it, and on the hardware side, the latest OCZ
Vertex firmware apparently does too. Last I heard, Intel are waiting until
there's an official spec.

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DenisM
This would be too inexcusable to be true...

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pmjordan
They can just make it a point revision or a standardised extension. There is
no point in supporting this command on something like a hard disk, so it would
always have to be optional anyway. It's quite possible the SATA 3 standard was
too far along, or they wanted to make it an extension to SATA 2.

So it's no big deal, but I'd still like to see this standardised ASAP as I
think it will drive quite a bit of file system innovation.

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MetricMike
The article states SATA 3.0 should have a maximum throughput of 6
Gbits/second. But isn't that the same expected throughput of USB 3.0? What
advantage would I have in using SATA 3.0 (Revised?) over USB 3.0?

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pmjordan
* SATA is point-to-point, so each drive gets this bandwidth. USB is a tree, bandwidth is arbitrated between devices.

* SATA 2 came into commercial use relatively shortly after introduction. I haven't seen any USB 3.0 devices yet (host adapters/motherboards _or_ nodes) and driver support during the USB 1.1->2.0 transition was pretty bad. Apparently, Windows users will need to wait for Microsoft to release host controller drivers. I suspect they'll only be available for Windows 7. No idea when OSX will support it, presumably Linux will be first, assuming the spec is made available to the developers.

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MetricMike
Thanks! I've been trolling the Wikipedia pages for both of them but that's
easily the best summary I've come across so far. =)

