Digital Home Thoughts: Serial ATA-II Specifications Approved

"The Serial ATA-II Working Group said Tuesday evening that the signaling speed for Serial ATA-II has been set, as well as a cabling specification which will allow companies to define external Serial ATA storage enclosures. According to a spokeswoman for the group, the Working Group has formally approved 3-Gbit/s speeds for Serial ATA-II, the successor to the Serial ATA standard used by today's disk drives. The specification is in the first of two 30-day review periods, during which members can comment on the draft specification before its formal review."

As far as I can tell from this article as well as other sources, the increase in transfer speed to 3Gbps will not make a difference to us right now because we are currently limited by the internal hard drive speed, i.e. the speed at which data is read from the platter of the hard drive. The current specs are already faster than that speed. So why would we care about Serial ATA II? "The new specification will provide some important overhead as the disk-to-interface transfer rates improve over time." Flash based drives anyone? :) "In addition, the new cabling specification will also allow for external SATA enclosures, something that the current Serial ATA-I specification does not permit."