Samsung ships Serial ATA II drives, shows hybrid harddrive

San Jose (CA) - Samsung claims it is first to make harddrives with a Serial ATA II (SATA II) interface commercially available. Three new drives were announced on Wednesday, aiming at gaming and enterprise applications.

The big news of Samsung's announcement is the availability of the interface and not yet another capacity increase. The new drives integrate native support for maximum I/O speeds of 3.0 Gbit per second, double the bandwidth of the first SATA generation. The Samsung drives are available in sizes of 80, 120 and 160 GByte.

SATA II come with the SATA feature set, including a capability of "daisy chaining" drives via cables, which allows users to store virtually an unlimited amount of data by simply adding additional drives to a system.

Samsung also announced a prototype of a hybrid-harddrive. On display at this year's WinHEC, the company said it has created the first fully functional disk drive to combine NAND-based Flash with rotating storage media.

Wolfgang Gruener
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Wolfgang Gruener is an experienced professional in digital strategy and content, specializing in web strategy, content architecture, user experience, and applying AI in content operations within the insurtech industry. His previous roles include Director, Digital Strategy and Content Experience at American Eagle, Managing Editor at TG Daily, and contributing to publications like Tom's Guide and Tom's Hardware.