New & Future Storage Technologies

Serial ATA (1.0 and 2.0) / Serial ATA RAID

  Serial ATA (SATA) is a new drive interface technology.  SATA controllers have been on the market for several months and the drives will appear in the first quarter of 2003.  Serial ATA uses a different interface technology (Serial Data Bus transfer) than IDE PATA (Parallel Data Bus).  This type of bus can be scaled to higher frequencies.  Physically, Serial ATA uses long, thin cables, making it easier to connect the hard drive and improving airflow inside the system (especially critical in small form-factor units). The cables use just two low-voltage data wires - one for sending and one for receiving data, and the signals are phase-reversed to prevent inference.  In addition, SATA uses point to point communication with improved error-checking capabilities.

  Serial ATA is focused on the desktop and entry-level server markets and is fully compatible with existing software and operating systems.  Look for Promise and High-Point Technologies SATA controller cards already on the market.

For more information see: www.asisupport.com/serial_ata_faq.htm,  http://www.serialata.org, or http://www.seagate.com/newsinfo/technology/sata/faq/index.html 

  Another technology we have already seen integrated with motherboards is Serial ATA RAID.  Much like standard IDE RAID, you can get the benefits of RAID at a lower cost than using SCSI components.  Such controllers are already being integrated with desktop motherboards.

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)

  Serial Attached SCSI is a new standard being developed for the next generation of SCSI storage devices.  It will feature a super fast serial data bus that dedicates 150 Mbytes/sec per device and will also be able to support up to 128 devices per channel.  Products are expected to be released in late 2003.

For more information see: http://www.serialattachedscsi.com

Ultra 320 SCSI

  The seventh generation SCSI  Bus Interface was released in mid 2002.  This specification is called Ultra320 and has maximum transfer rate 320Mbytes/second.  This is twice as fast as the previous Ultra160 SCSI standard and also provides other features to improve reliability, performance, and ease of use.  Ultra320 is of course backwards compatible with previous SCSI standards and devices and you can purchase Ultra320 RAID Controllers for fast and reliable fault-tolerant data storage.

  Ultra320 is not just the next level in the SCSI standard, but a necessary step for the future growth of storage technology.  With 10,000 RPM and 15,000 RPM SCSI Hard drives providing extremely fast read/write data access and burst data speeds, a faster SCSI Bus interface is needed when using multiple drives (remember that SCSI drives share the same cable/bus per controller so when using multiple drives bottlenecks can occur).  The increased bandwidth of Ultra320 is a solution to this problem.  It is also the perfect for the high-volume demands of applications such as databases, streaming digital audio and video, video editing, corporate network servers, and RAID configurations.

For more information on SCSI standards see:  http://www.t10.org, or http://www.scsita.org