SATA 3.0 specification released

SATA-IO has released specification for SATA 3.0 standard on May 27th. Specification states transfer speed of up to 6 Gb/s and enhancements to support multimedia applications. Some of these enhancements are:

• A new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command to enable isochronous data transfers for bandwidth-hungry audio and video applications
• An NCQ Management feature that helps optimize performance by enabling host processing and management of outstanding NCQ commands
• Improved power management capabilities
• A small Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for more compact 1.8-inch storage devices
• A connector designed to accommodate 7mm optical disk drives for thinner and lighter notebooks
• Alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standard

As you would expect it is backward compatible with earlier implementations. Full presentation containing more information can be viewed here.
It should not be too long before we start seeing SATA 3.0 drives around since about 98% of all desktop hard disks today are SATA drives.