Seagate Backs Intel's Silicon Photonics?

On a recent blog at Seagate, Mark Wojtasiak [Product Marketing Manager] sang the words of praise for Intel's 50Gbps Silicon Photonics technology. Could this be the future of storage?

According to Mark, what makes this technology very attractive for companies like Seagate is the unprecedented transfer speed - 6.25GB/s is from 8-16 times faster than the current storage standards [SATA and SAS], and even PCI Express 2.0 tops out at 2.5GB/s in each direction.

Mark put out a theory "if such technology was embedded into hard drives," for instance "at the core drive level to improve latency in the disk itself.  Now we are talking real advantages to performance in terms of backup, content downloads, content creation, content sharing…quite frankly everything. It’s always fun to ponder the 'what if's' of new technology."

Does this mean Silicon Photonics could replace SATA and SAS, rather than USB, FireWire… read, a path to a single standard for internal and peripheral devices? Just imagine how simple could computers look then… a field day if you're systems integrator or a case manufacturer.