Digital Home Thoughts: SATA3 May Need SSD to Reach 6.0 Gbps

"In the past, the raw throughput gained by moving from one hard drive standard to another has been relatively unimportant. An announcement that theoretical drive bandwidth had doubled from 1.5Gbps (SATA) to 3Gbps (SATA2) makes for great copy, but anyone familiar with the mechanics of a hard drive knows that standard HDD throughput typically couldn't saturate SATA, much less SATA2. The real benefit of new drive standards has typically come from those features that take second billing—thinner cables, smaller connectors, hot swappability, Native Command Queuing (NCQ), and improved power management. The advent of SSDs, however, changes everything."

If you try and plan ahead with your computer purchases to help future-proof them, you might want to start considering including SATA3 on your shopping list. Since it sounds like an SSD drive might be all but required in order to get the maximum performance benefit, you might as well add that to your list as well.