The solid-state disk drive is supposed to be fast. After all, it's mostly made of memory -- and last we checked, flash RAM was fast. In practice, however, some applications with SSDs can be slower than with HDDs, the reason being the way data is cached as it's collected and moved through I/O channels into system RAM.
The transfer interface is the bottleneck, and the engineers that contribute to the Serial ATA (SATA) transfer specification admit that fact openly. Just a few years ago, you might never have thought that 3 gigabits per second (Gbps) would end up causing problems; but as it turned out, the faster SATA 2.0 maximum transfer rate enabled new applications, which ended up introducing users to those bottlenecks for the first time.
Now, the SATA-IO organization is preparing to eliminate that logjam, with the publication this morning of the SATA 3.0 specification. Its goal is to accelerate maximum transfer speeds to 6 Gbps, and in so doing, widen the bandwidth between components where these new bottlenecks have recently been introduced.
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