The SATA specification will get another speed bump, this time all the way up to 6GB/s, which doubles the speed of the current SATA II specification standard.

While some question the need for the speed bump, the SATA Revision 3.0 specification, as it known, will include advanced features for improved power management as well as data streaming which should improve performance.

The SATA standards consortium released the specifications that have been agreed to for the physical layer (PHY) portion of the new standard. The new standard will be backward compatible with existing SATA products, but they will of course not operate at the new speed.

The new SATA 6GB/s standard will be shown at the Intel Developers Forum going on this week. This will give attendees a look at the performance of the new standard.

No word yet on how soon we can expect the new standard to start showing up on motherboards or how soon hard drive manufacturers will start moving to incorporate this standard into their existing products.