Seagate and AMD recently announced the development of 6Gbps SATA technology, which dramatically increases the speed of data transfer. The firms will be showcasing the latest breakthrough at the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans this week. The new interface is designed for bandwidth-hungry desktop and laptop PC applications including gaming, streaming video and graphics multimedia. Prototypes will be displayed this week in the form of enhanced Seagate Barracuda hard drive. Seagate will showcase Barracuda 7200.12 3Gb/second hard drive and Barracuda 6Gb/second drive - in a desktop PC to show the performance difference between the two generations.

The PC is powered by an AMD prototype SATA 6Gb/second chipset.

The Seagate SATA 3Gb/second drive runs at more than 2.5Gigabits per second and the SATA 6Gb/second drive at 5.5Gigabits per second, with the performance of each storage interface displayed on the PC monitor.

Products with 6Gbps SATA technology will ship in late 2009.