Web designers and developers spend thousands of hours each year working dutifully at their computers, focused on task after task as they endlessly tap keys, stair at pixels, and wiggle a mouse.

With such a close relationship between man and machine, it is little wonder that web professionals are often hardware hounds, sporting over-clocked processors; oodles of dynamic random access memory (DRAM); liquid cooling systems; and panoramic monitors all aimed at making every development-related interaction and computation just a few milliseconds quicker. After all, no one likes waiting around.

SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SSD)

Recently, Micron Technology, Inc., Boise, Idaho, announced the industry’s first serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) 6 SSD—a new breed of consumer-focused, solid state drive, which promises to make many computer related tasks much faster, especially as other SSD makers release similar products and further drive-down prices for these faster SSDs.

SSDs already have a significant speed advantage over the much more common hard disk drive (HDD). HDDs are magnetic and mechanical devices, and, therefore, inherit the limitations of their physical structure. Each time you read or write to an HDD, a platter spins, an actuator adjusts, and a head reads the bits. In fact, try saving a file right now, and you will probably hear your computer’s HDD spinning.

SSDs are solid state and, thus, have no moving parts. So reading or writing data is limited only by semiconductor architecture and the speed of electrons.

This new Micron SSD is especially fast. More importantly, it is the first to use a 6Gb/s (that's 6 gigabits per second) SATA bus.

“Native support of SATA 6Gb/s means that the data path between the host computer and the SSD is twice as fast as the previous SATA 3Gb/s interface,” Micron said in an official release.

Performance Demonstration

To demonstrate its new SSD, Micron released a YouTube video, which is embedded here.

These SATA 6 SSDs should be generally available in early 2010. Micron has not yet released price information.

Editor’s Note: Armando Roggio, this article’s author and Ecommerce Developer's site director, is a former Micron Technology Marketing Communications Strategy Manager, who participated in some of Micron’s SSD marketing planning and execution in 2007 and 2008. Ecommerce Developer does generally cover and intends to cover significant computer hardware developments as those developments relate to the systems that web developers use, regardless of manufacturer.

Resources

• History of Digital Storage White Paper