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USB 3.0 the Real Deal, SATA 6GB Not Yet
MojoKid writes "HotHardware has posted a sneak peek at a new motherboard Asus has coming down the pipe with USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support. The Asus P7P55D-E Premium has a PLX PCI Express Gen 2 switch implementation that connects to NEC USB 3.0 and Marvell SATA 6G controller chips. With a USB 3.0 enabled external hard drive connected to a USB 2.0 port and then to the board's USB 3.0 port, there were some rather impressive gains to observe. When connected to a USB 3.0 port, the external hard drive was about 5 — 6x faster versus connecting over USB 2.0, with total throughput in excess of 130MB/sec. On the other hand, benchmarks with Seagate's new Barracuda XT SATA 6G drive show little performance difference but a burst rate that is off the charts. According to ATTO, there are slight overall performance benefits to be had connecting the drive to the SATA 6G controller, but the deltas were quite small; somewhere in the neighborhood of 5MB/s or so."
SATA 2 is already a bottleneck for many SSDs as this chart shows them hitting a wall at approximately 260MB/s. SATA 3 should release the proverbial floodgates for sequential reads.
On a tangent, Samsung just started mass production of a 64MB, 60nm phase-change RAM in September. Initially they are going to use them in mobile phones. The chips read, write and erase approximately 7 times faster than Flash memory, and also use less power. Sooner rather than later Samsung or the other PRAM producer Numonyx will put the chips in SSDs that can read and write at around 1GB per second.