What is SATA 3Gb/s?
SATA 3Gb/s is the next generation of Serial ATA interface speed. This advanced optional feature is one of 8 specifications published by the previous Serial ATA Working Group II. Since the optional specifications are advanced additions to the core specification (Serial ATA 1.0a) and authored by the 2nd Serial ATA working group they were quickly nick-named SATA II. The most important fact that system builders and consumers must keep in mind is that SATA II is not synonymous with 3Gb/s. Since the advanced features are optional and referred to as SATA II by the industry, SATA II could mean any or all of these specifications.
It is not recommended that vendors use SATA II to describe their SATA solutions. To read more about this view the
product naming guidelines.
SATA 3Gb/s is double the speed of the current SATA interface of 1.5Gb/s. SATA 3Gb/s enables the highest level of performance while maintaining desktop cost structures.
The Serial ATA bus & bandwidth design
In contrast to Ultra ATA’s parallel bus design, Serial ATA uses a single signal path to transmit data serially, or bit by bit, and a second serial path to return receipt acknowledgements to the sender. Because each signal path is a 2-wire differential pair, the Serial ATA bus consists of 4 signal lines per channel.
The 16-bit wide parallel Ultra ATA bus is capable of transmitting two bytes of data per clock. Though Serial ATA transmits only a single bit per clock, the serial bus may be run at a much higher speed to compensate for the loss of parallelism. Serial ATA was introduced with a bandwidth of 1500Mbits/sec, or 1.5Gbits/sec. Because data is encoded using 8b/10b encoding (an 80% efficient encoding used with digital differential signaling to maintain a constant average “DC” bias point), the effective maximum throughput is 150Mbytes/sec.
Ultra ATA/100
25MHz strobe
x 2 for double data rate clocking
x 16 for bits per edge
/ 8 bits per byte
= 100 Mbytes/sec
SATA 1.5Gb/s
1500MHz embedded clock
x 1 bit per clock
x 80% for 8b10b encoding
/ 8 bits per byte
= 150 Mbytes/sec
SATA 3Gb/s
3000MHz embedded clock
x 1 bit per clock
x 80% for 8b10b encoding
/ 8 bits per byte
= 300 Mbytes/sec
http://www.sata-io.org/3g.asp