SATA III now available... similar with USB 3

how about LAN? I think its time also to upgrade it. =(

We're familiar with NCQ as a means of dealing with the seek and rotational latency inherent in mechanical hard drives, but wondered what need there was for NCQ with SSDs. (Intel's just-announced SSDs have NCQ listed prominently among their specifications.) She said that in the case of SSDs, NCQ has the primary benefit of hiding latency in the host system. If you look at a bus trace, said Huffman, there's quite a bit of time between the completion of a command and the issuance of another one. Queuing up commands can keep the SSD more fully occupied.

So a fancy term for concurrency then? Admittedly it's more necessary than I had imagined when I commented on this the other day, since it now masks inefficiencies in the bus protocol, but only just.

I don't know why people complain quite so much about SATA connectors. You have to be pretty ham-fisted to break them and as for being 'secure,' once plugged in and inside a case how are they falling out?

AHCI is a Good Thing, and I think the various mobo makers *will* adopt it, but the problem right now is an OS one. The majority of users are running XP and are happy with it, but AHCI complicates OS installs. For folks like you and me who install their own OS, this makes AHCI as much of a drawback as a feature.

Once Vista gets majority market share (too bad, but it is inevitable), AHCI will take off. Vista, OSX, and Linux all support AHCI natively, with no F6 floppies. For now, there's actually an advantage to not supporting AHCI for AMD. Nvidia is slowly getting with it and Intel has for some time, that really only leaves AMD out. Via doesn't matter and hasn't for some time.

I don't know why, but I hate that term so much. It's a word that has no reason to exist when there were perfectly acceptable words with the same meaning well before the term was made up.

Indeed. Its origins just reek of trying too damn hard to be cool.

Has anyone else noticed the image used and grokked the significance?

Damage, got a date for that review?

I still can't get AHCI working properly with my install of XP x64 on a G35 mobo w/ ICH9R southbridge.

I can enable NCQ, but the drives still don't show up as removable device. Using the latest intel matrix storage manager, which is supposed to fix this problem, but still no dice.

Now if they could just come up with connectors that didn't shear of easily and stayed connected when attached.

As much as a PITA that Molex and PATA cables are, at least they didn't fall off or worse, break if moved.

So when are we going to get drives that hit the 3gbps max we have now? Let alone 6gbps.

Having the name "Huffman" and a job involving data storage/transmission and encoding is amusingly appropriate. What's the term for people who have names that match their jobs?

The first sentence of the second paragraph is written awkwardly. The ordering of words implies that you are claiming that older SATA cables will be compatible with older SATA devices and hosts just as the newer devices and hosts will be. One has to read on to find out from context what you meant to say.

Love my Gigabyte motherboards, but I hate the Gigabyte locking SATA cables; I've wrecked two drive interfaces because they didn't unlatch correctly.

I wonder if people will try to put it on PCI cards, those just don't seem to want to go.

Get locking latches. Problem solved, and well worth the added bit of money, IMO.

You spell her name two different ways in the article.

deleted ............

"As much as a PITA that Molex and PATA cables are, at least they didn't fall off or worse, break if moved."

Have you never seen locking SATA cables? All recent Gigabyte boards come with them as did my Asus Maximus I purchased in march.

That group does not collect fees from its members or charge royalties for the use of its creations. As a result, it has no money to conduct an interoperability testing program and doesn't certify AHCI implementations. The thinking here, she explained, is that the participants ought to be sufficiently capable of doing the legwork for themselves.

Hahahhaah. Oh man that's great.