Fujitsu to unveil SAS prototypes at SAS Plugfest 2004
Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc. (FCPA) informed on its plans to showcase small form factor (SFF) hard drives with 3Gbps throughput (serial attached SCSI, SAS) at SAS Plugfest 2004.
If you remember, the Serial Attached SCSI working group (assembled early in February 2002 as a counterpoise of Serial ATA) includes Seagate, Maxtor, IBM, LSI Logic, Compaq, Adaptec, etc.
The key advantages of a serial interface are clear. Even if you increase the number of conductors in the current generation of interfaces, there´s always a problem of signal sync. During serial transmission signals utilize different clocks thus avoiding sync problems and providing higher throughput. This technology is already used in 3GIO, FireWire, and USB.
By the moment Seagate and HP already had their SAS solutions showcased at CeBIT 2003, while Intel and Emulex informed on plans to develop processors for both SAS and SATA drives. Last November Adaptec introduced the first SAS controller prototypes providing 3Gbps on average at 5Gbps peak throughput.
In the future we should see the 2nd and the 3rd generations of SAS controllers providing 6Gbps and 12Gbps throughputs, respectively, and supporting HostRAID.
This January LSI Logic launched shipments of its LSISAS1064 SAS controller based on Fusion-MPT (Message Passing Technology) architecture and also providing 3Gbps throughput.
Besides, on February 18 Seagate announced its 2.5" Savvio HDD family. Its SAS variant should arrive in Q3 2004.
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