Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

MAXTOR DEMONSTRATES EARLY SUCCESS WITH SAS INTERFACE

Maxtor Corporation, a worldwide leader in hard disk drives, announced that it has validated the operation of its Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface development by successfully exchanging SAS data packets between two prototype devices. Building on the company's accomplishments in being first to market with the previous three generations of SCSI interfaces, Maxtor engineers were able to successfully initialize the target device, execute SCSI commands, and read and write data across the interface.

SAS is a new disk and near cabinet interface that was developed as a follow on to the parallel SCSI interface. The interface is designed to improve storage system performance, scalability, and availability while providing compatibility with Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives.

"Maxtor engineers have quickly taken the SAS specification and applied it to concept hardware and firmware and demonstrated its functionality," said Kevin Wittmer, director of technical marketing for Maxtor's Server Products Group. "We are committed to leading the industry movement to this new generation of Serial storage architectures as we did with the Ultra2, Ultra160 and Ultra320 parallel interfaces."

One of the main benefits of SAS is that it will provide IT managers with new levels of configuration flexibility. SAS and SATA are complimentary technologies that can be implemented together in one storage enclosure to meet a broad range of requirements. Maxtor currently offers SATA drives and will offer SAS drives, which both can be installed on the same backplane, maximizing storage investments. Customers will have the ability to deploy the drives best suited to meet an application's requirements for capacity or performance. Maxtor MaXLine SATA drives provide high capacity for near-line and low duty cycle data center applications, while Maxtor Atlas SAS drives will provide the performance required for transactional, high I/O applications.

For more information on Serial Attached SCSI, please refer to the Maxtor Web site at: www.maxtor.com/en/technologies/serial_attached_scsi/index.htm