Maxtor Corporation announced today it is now shipping the Atlas® family of disk drives, the fastest drives in their class1, with the latest enterprise-class interface technology – Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). The SAS interface allows SAS and SATA disk drives to be configured in the same enclosure, enabling customers to mix and match high-performance Atlas drives with high-capacity MaXLine® SATA drives to meet a broad range of price, performance and capacity requirements. Maxtor pioneered the use of high-capacity ATA disk drives in nearline and midline applications with its MaXLine drives, the de facto standard in this market.
“Maxtor with their new Atlas SAS disk drives is among the leading vendors helping to make the benefits of SAS – increased performance, scalability and cost-effectiveness – a reality for customers,” said Mark Pollard, vice president of marketing at Adaptec. “The breadth of Maxtor’s product line should help customers match system configurations with their application requirements.”
“We currently have Atlas SAS drives in qualification with global OEMs and system vendors,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing, core products at Maxtor. “We expect those customers to complete testing soon, followed by volume shipments. The Atlas SAS drives, coupled with our MaXLine SATA drives, combine to give Maxtor the industry’s broadest SAS/SATA enterprise drive portfolio.”
Featuring a data transfer rate of 3.0Gb/s, the SAS interface brings together the best features of other enterprise interfaces including:
*Dual ports – increases system availability by providing two data paths to a drive
*Multi-initiator capability – enables multiple hosts to access a drive simultaneously
*Point-to-point connectivity – improves system performance and fault isolation capabilities
*Scalable bandwidth – via wide ports
*Scalability – more than 16,000 devices per SAS domain
*Full duplex capability – allows drives to simultaneously send and receive for two different IO operations
*Rate matching – supports 1.5Gb/s SATA and 3.0Gb/s SAS devices for optimal performance
*IOPS performance – up to 128 queue depth support
*SCSI investment protection – employs SCSI command set to maintain compatibility with existing SCSI infrastructure
*Compatibility with SATA devices
SAS and SATA enterprise drives are complementary storage elements ideal for the new SAS-based common infrastructure. SAS drives are designed for the most demanding, mission critical applications while SATA drives are well suited for nearline and other less demanding small and medium business applications.
Maxtor is a founding member of the Serial Attached SCSI Working Group that authored the first draft of the SAS standard now managed by the ANSI T10 standards body. Maxtor has worked extensively with leading system and component suppliers to test compatibility of Atlas SAS drives with their products. For more information on SAS including technical documentation and white papers visit http://www.maxtor.com/sas.
