Maxtor extends SAS interface to Atlas enterprise drives

Maxtor Corporation´s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface is available on qualification units of the Atlas 10K V and Atlas 15K II drives. The company has shipped qualification units to top OEMs as well as over 30 system manufacturers. Qualification units shipped include the 300GB and the Atlas 10K V.



The Atlas 15K II SAS drive features capacities of 36GB, 73GB and 147GB and a 15,000 RPM rotational speed. The drive offers a maximum sustained transfer rate of 98MB/sec and average seek times as fast as 3.0ms.



The Atlas 10K V SAS drive features capacities of 73GB, 147GB and 300GB and a 10,000 RPM rotational speed. The drive offers a maximum sustained transfer rate of 89MB/sec and average seek times as fast as 4.0ms. Both the Atlas 15K II and Atlas 10K V drives include a 16MB cache and are designed to the specification of 1.4 million hours Mean Time to Failure (MTTF).



SAS is the next generation of the SCSI interface, developed to improve storage system performance, scalability, and availability and extend the capabilities of today's parallel SCSI disk drives. Featuring a data transfer rate of up to 3.0Gb/s, SAS allows for higher levels of performance and adds a second port to the hard drive to enhance system availability and reliability. This second port provides two separate data paths to the drive. Both the Atlas 15K II and Atlas 10K V drives with the SAS interface feature dual ports, enabling the design of highly-available enterprise storage systems.