Seagate has just showed off a new hard drive that boasts a SATA 3, enabling it to transfer files at burst speeds up to 6Gbps – that translates to approximately 600MB/s in the real world, which is phenomenally fast.

Currently, the SATA 2 interface is able to shift a theoretical maximum of 3Gbps, and SATA 3 is four times as fast as SATA drives that peak at just 1.5Gbps.

SATA3 will maintain full compatibility with SATA and SATA2—all current motherboards and drive cables should flawlessly support SATA3 drives, though you’ll need a SATA3-compatible chipset in order to take advantage of the new standard’s 6Gbps throughput.

SATA3 will be practically useful for low bandwidth desktop and laptopsapplications including gaming, streaming video and graphics multimedia. Seagate reveals  users can only expect the first SATA3-based hard drive by the end of the year.