THE FIRST Serial ATA devices are only just starting to make themselves known. Only a very brave motherboard manufacturer would dare launch a product with SATA as the only drive interface. Which makes it a bit of a surprise that Marvell has already started sampling SATA II chips.
The new SATA II bridge chips as Marvell calls them pump data back and forth at 3gigabits pre second. That"s twice the speed of the current SATA devices and chips. It should be noted that, while the speed increase is undoubtedly a good thing, there aren"t any hard drives that come even close to delivering that kind of constant throughput.
Marvell claims it was the first to market with a SATA I device in 2001. The company makes interfaces for both sides of the cable, motherboard/card based host controllers and drive-side.