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Serial SCSI Standard Coming Soon

Posted by michael on from the scuzzy-wuzzy dept.

rchatterjee writes "SCSI is very close to joining ATA in leaving a parallel interface design behind in favor of serial one. Serial attached SCSI, as the standard will be known, is expected to be ratified sometime in the second quarter of this year according to this article at Computerworld. Hard drive manufacturers Seagate and Maxtor have already said that they will have drives conforming to the new standard shipping by the end of the year. The new standard will shatter the current SCSI throughput limit of 320 megabit/sec with a starting maximum throughput of 3 gigabit/sec. But before this thread turns into a SCSI fanboy vs. ATA fanboy flame war this other article states that Serial Attached SCSI will be compatible with SATA drives so you can have the best of both worlds."

3 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. How parallel will it be? by tjstork · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Will this new standard be able to do things in parallel the way SCSI can? Will I turn my server into a PC like box that seemingly pauses every time the swap file gets touched?

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    This is my sig.
  2. Horray! by norton_I · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hopefully this will eventually lead to the elimination of the distinction between ATA and SCSI interfaces. Already the feature distinctions between the two are blurring, hopefully soon the interface will be the same and people will just decide whether they need fast or cheap drives. That would improve the quality of desktop class drives and lower the price on workstation/server drives, as well as make system managment a bit easier.

  3. Is this a trend? by Anonvmous+Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've only paid attention to HD controllers for the last couple of years or so. But I'm starting to wonder if we're seeing a pattern here. "We'll make everything more efficient by making it serial, and then years later when that's not enough we'll make it paralell to send even MORE data through!"

    Anybody think we'll have a massive paralell trend in a few years?