Features - Storage Innovations:

NVIDIA DRIVING NEXT-GEN SATA STORAGE TECHNOLOGY TO PC DESKTOP

In conjunction with leading hard drive manufacturers, including Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung and Seagate, NVIDIA Corp announced joint efforts to bring next-generation Serial ATA (SATA) technology into desktop PCs, workstations and servers. The SATA 3Gb per second standard provides up to 3Gb per second of bandwidth, an improvement of more than 100 percent over the existing SATA and parallel interface technology available today.

As part of the Company's commitment to driving innovative integrated technologies into its single-chip MCP architectures, the NVIDIA SATA 3Gb per second solution will be incorporated into future NVIDIA nForce media and communications processors (MCPs) by the end of the year. NVIDIA will also be working with Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, and Seagate to ensure interoperability with its SATA 3Gb per second products for desktop, server, and workstation environments.

"We are extremely excited to work with the leading hard drive manufacturers to help bring this new level of speed and performance to the desktop, workstation, and server markets," said Ali Simnad, senior product manager for storage technologies at NVIDIA. "Our close partnerships with Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate and others will ensure product innovation, interoperability and availability in the market."

"Customers who need performance have depended on the Hitachi Deskstar line to deliver the speed, and it's for this reason that we plan to integrate the new SATA 3Gb per second capabilities into our products," said Jose Antelo, general manager of 3.5-inch Consumer and Commercial HDDs for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "The 3Gb per second potential of SATA represents a doubling of the interface transfer rate and will solidify the role that SATA drives are playing in bandwidth-intensive applications."

"As a founding member of the Serial ATA Working Group, we are pleased to see companies such as NVIDIA promoting the adoption of SATA. SATA offers many benefits for the PC environment, where NVIDIA and Maxtor have growing opportunities," said Mike Alexenko, senior director of product marketing at Maxtor. "On the other side of the application spectrum, we are also seeing increased interest in SATA from enterprise customers for midline and nearline secondary storage applications, where Maxtor has the majority market share. We look forward to the mass roll out of SATA II extensions such as the final 3.0Gb per second interface specification and Native Command Queuing that will further enhance ATA drive performance in many computing environments."

"We are looking forward to new market opportunities that SATA 3Gb per second with Native Command Queuing will bring to the disk drive industry. This new interface will open up innovative applications of affordable disk drives with high performance," said Debasis Baral, vice president of SISA HDD Labs at Samsung Electronics. "We are happy to work with NVIDIA from early stage to accelerate introduction of this new technology."

"As a founder of the Serial ATA Working Group and the first to supply the industry with Serial ATA drives, Seagate's committed to working with NVIDIA and the industry to bring 3Gb per secondec technology into play while ensuring interoperability and ease of integration," said Marc Noblitt, Seagate manager of Interface Planning. "3Gb per secondec provides the fastest burst rate performance in desktop applications where screen refreshes and small block transfers of data are frequent. 3Gb per secondec provides fast interface speeds both internally and externally so all storage devices operate at their optimal levels, and also provides support for external devices, opening up many new possibilities."

PC systems and motherboards incorporating support for next-generation NVIDIA nForce MCPs and SATA 3Gb per second technology will be available later this year.