Serial ATA 3.0 is go, the Sata-IO industry body announced yesterday.

Sata 3.0 doubles the bus' current peak bandwidth to 6Gb/s, improves its power-conservation capabilities and upgrades the standard's Native Command Queuing (NCQ) technology to add streaming and better command management, all designed to make it easier to get video data smoothly off a drive.

In a move that will come as a boon to netbook fans, Sata 3.0 will introduce a small low insertion force (LIF) connector for 1.8in hard drives.

So far, netbooks fitted with HDDs have either used relatively bulky, notebook-oriented 2.5in Sata drives or compact but slow 1.8in parallel ATA units. Sata 3.0 will make it possible to get the best of both worlds - fast data, small drive - into netbooks, making for lighter, thinner machines.

Laptops ditto, since the spec also introduces a connector design for skinnier, 7mm optical disk drives. ®