While the SATA 3.0 update is expected to be set in cement in about two weeks (in case you missed it), Intel reminded us that the Serial ATA 2.6 update was published last month. SATA 2.6's white paper has an outline for a whole new slimline connector for 1.8” hard drives.
This is designed to reduce the space used in a notebook or UMPC as it allows the drives to mount lower power and fewer pinned SATA plugs on the drives' shorter edge. Currently the SATA connector is a bit too big to fit on 1.8” disk drive and when the original specification was put through, they didn’t expect SATA to be adopted into these components.
NCQ, as we previously discussed in the introduction to hard drive technology article, is a questionably useful inclusion into consumer hard drive technology. Since a consumer level hard drive never fills the request queue the performance is marred by the large NCQ overhead...
Intel about NAND and SATA on IDF
Posted on Tuesday, April 17 2007 @ 5:09 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck