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I see that Newegg has a new Western Digital VelociRaptor out with a 6.0Gb SATA interface: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136555

What is the bottleneck with this drive? The transfer rate of the SATA interface or the transfer rate of the actual drive?

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According to The Tech Report:

More puzzling than the VR200M's cache size is the drive's swanky new 6Gbps Serial ATA interface. There might be a small chance that this latest VelociRaptor can burst data from its cache quicker than the prior SATA standard's 300MB/s limit, but the drive's own spec sheet confirms that it can't sustain even half that speed. I don't imagine the faster interface is needed at all.

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That's a good review - looks like the "Maximum Sustained Data Rate" is ~150Mb/sec...which would put the bottleneck with the hard drive not the interface...thanks! – quickcel Apr 9 '10 at 17:14
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Most SATA controllers will not take advantage of the 6GB/s speed. You'll need a new SATA controller to handle this. As per a review on newegg:

You need to get a SATA 6.0 controller (pci-e for best result) or a new motherboard/system to run SATA 6.0 speeds.

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I think the question is, even if you have a 6.0 Gbps controller, is the disk capable of transferring data at that rate (or, at least, faster than 3.0 Gbps)? – coneslayer Apr 9 '10 at 16:37
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