Fujitsu samples the first 2.5" Serial ATA hard drives with SATA II Phase I support

The era of Serial ATA II draws near: today Fujitsu Computer Products of America started sampling the first 2.5" 5400rpm Serial ATA HDDs to selected partners. The new drives feature Marvell 88i6535 chips supporting the extended SATA specs — SATA II Phase I, including the Native Command Queuing.

For the first time we reported about Marvell 88i6535 SoC as far back as in September at the moment of announcement. Marvell 88i6535 features Fujitsu HDD controller, 88C6591 core, 2nd generation Serial ATA PHY and ARM966E-S processor core. The Native Command Queuing support is carried out by analyzing requests from CPU and optimizing the queue of their execution to maximize throughput and minimize seek time. Serial ATA Native Command Queuing is generally alike the SCSI instruction queue organization, but supports up to 32 instructions vs. 256-level depth of SCSI.

Fujitsu´s new 2.5" SATA II Phase I HDDs designed for mobile PCs, multimedia boxes and server blades haven´t been assigned series name yet, and their volume production dates are also unknown. However, it seems that Fujitsu-Marvell tandem isn´t going to lag behind the Seagate-Silicon Image duet working in the same field that introduced its first Serial ATA Native Command Queuing prototype (SATALink SiI 3112A) as far back as in September.

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