As the Solid State Disk manufacturers push their latest SSD transfer rates towards Serial ATA's limit of 3 Gbps, the Serial ATA International Organisation has officially ratified the 6 Gbps SATA physical layer specification to double the bandwidth.  The SATA version 3.0 standard is expected to become available by the end of the year, according to EETimes.

Besides doubling the speed, the new version will add several extensions to its command set, including some relating to command queuing to help improve quality of service for video streaming and support high priority interrupts.  Like the existing SATA specification, the new version supports the use of existing SATA cables and connectors and distances of up to 1 metre.  However, due to the higher processing speed required for the new chips, they may require higher power consumption, although the new version aims to improve power management.  To help consumers distinguish between the current and new version, SATA version 3.0 certified devices will also feature a new logo.

Since the first SATA drives went on the market in 2001, over 650 million SATA drives have been shipped, according to the International Data Corp. research director, John Rydning.  Now, pretty much every desktop and laptop will have one or more SATA drives this year, while around 1/3 of servers will also use SATA drives. 

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for SSD manufacturers to improve their disk controllers to reach the 6 Gbps barrier.  However, one issue SSD manufacturers need to deal with is write performance, particularly the handling of multiple write transfers such as writing multiple small files.  A few examples include software installation, Outlook synchronisation and web browsing, such as opening a webpages containing a lot images that are not already cached.