Today's drives have interface boards that run at what, 300? Trouble is that once the cache is full, then you are stuck at the hard drive's board-to-disk rate. A WesternDigital 7200 RPM goes around 92 or so per drive. Seagate and others, in the 60-80's. On a 1-1 basis, 92 < 300! RAID five drives and then you could be doing 5 x 92 = 460... and in this situation that 300 is a factor as you have more transfer rate than bus (460 < 300). So, going to 600 or higher per bus becomes very attractive!

You really need to look at the Cache to Disk rate of your drive to really see your true data speed first and then worry about what your SATA controler is doing.

SATA 3Gb/s is 3 Giga bit per second

8 bits is one byte, thus max transfare rate per channel (cabel without splitter) is 375 Mbyte in theory.
Going to SATA 6Gb/s ups the max throughput to 750 Mbyte/s in theory.
Probably only SSD disk will reach those speeds perhaps in a couple of years who knows.
Next thing to consider when using intel or amd southbridges is the transfer rates to the northbridge from the southbridge (ICH10R) they are often 2-3 Gbyte/s so its going to take a while untill a new bottleneck emerges when using software raid.
Other solutions might be a raid controller card that sits on a PCIE 2.0 wich has its lanes routed directly to the northbridge.

Somehow this SATA standard advancement is being underthought. Sata3, TS TMSataN, is much better than mere perpendicular, which is oggle for Media Hound & priced well. 
sata3 is more stable system which larger code O/S & Softies' need, as mere 3 gb/s still wasn't enough to really get library pumping.Pumpitup&Spititout! Now Twice as Fast. 
Buy Two Today.
Somebody gonna be even more challenged with SSD topper Light Miler. That is, If its Light & Within Miler o'so. All Is Mein. Mein, Faster, Mein....
drashek oxford/english whale killer.


"Besides easing the use of external hard drives, it will open up a whole new category of products like eSATA memory sticks, which can double as easily bootable drives and will be much faster than their USB brethren."

Oh really?

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/20080809/image/stdom1.jpg

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/20080809/image/stdom2.jpg

http://www.innodisk.com/flashstorage_specification.jsp?flashid=29#tab_spqc

Been there, done that.




So 1 SATA disk cant saturate this

but what about a raid system with like 6 disks??

surely it will help.