X-bit labs

Samsung, Marvell Enable Serial ATA-300 Hard Disk Drives.

Category: Storage

by Anton Shilov

[ 10/21/2004 | 09:35 AM ]

Samsung Electronics and Marvell announced the new hard disk drives with native 300Mbps I/O transfer speed using storage and input/output technologies developed by Samsung Electronics and Marvell.

“Samsung’s promotion of Serial ATA technology in the storage industry has led to close collaboration with component manufacturers such as Marvell to jointly introduce cutting-edge products. At IDF, Samsung showcased its 3.0Gbps I/O transaction capability with Marvell’s 88i6525 SOC,” said Mr. TJ Lee, Vice President of Marketing for Samsung Electronics’ Storage Division.

Marvell’s SATA SOC featured on Samsung’s new drives boasts the smallest pin count and footprint of any HDD SOC on the market, Marvell said. To drastically reduce pin count for HDDs, the 88i6525’s 128-pin TQFP package with 14mm x 14mm footprint make it the first product to bring to reality one of the primary goals of Serial ATA: lower costs via pin reduction and PCB area savings. Marvell’s chip features the industry’s lowest power consumption, according to its developer, due primarily to its Serial ATA physical layer transceiver (PHY) and low-power, high-data rate read channel technology. The 88i6525’s read channel core can run up to 1.25Gb/s, which is another industry first for a desktop HDD.

Samsung’s new HDDs that sport 3.0Gbps transfer speed and Native Command Queuing technology is likely to offer pretty high performance for modern storage devices along with compatibility with future I/O controllers. However, enablement of 300Mbps transfer speed alone does not mean huge benefit for customers, as typically performance of hard disk drives is limited by read and write speeds as well as seek time. Furthermore, Serial ATA-300 is a speed-bin of the original Serial ATA, not a Serial ATA-II standard that brings some advantages over the previous technology incarnation, such as hot-plug capability.

To meet EU’s regulation on Restriction of Hazardous Substances, Samsung’s next generation products are designed to be environment friendly. Samsung has been supplying lead-free drives since last year to various OEM customers.

It is unclear when Samsung’s new Serial ATA-300 HDDs hit the market.