Adaptec Inc. has started work on a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface in conjunction with several hard drive makers to help push the SCSI successor along. Adaptec is working with Fujitsu, Maxtor, Seagate and Hitachi on various SAS testing efforts and co-marketing exercises. The companies also hope to make sure the SAS interface works well with both SAS and Serial ATA disk drives.
Seagate and HP demonstrated their SAS products at CeBIT earlier this year. Intel and Emulex also announced their plans to work on storage processors for both SAS and Serial ATA.
The SAS products should give users a host of benefits, including more compact storage systems and longer cabling distances for systems. Some estimates have SAS pushing single streams of data through at rates several times faster than its parallel predecessor.