Seagate Technology announced its Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard disk drives are being sampled by OEMs for qualification. Earlier this year the company demonstrated its Savvio 10K.1 and Cheetah 15K.4 drives in work at an industry event.

The Cheetah 15K.4 and Savvio 10K.1 drive solutions together bring high levels of performance and reliability for IT professionals in the enterprise. When combined with SAS, these drives add additional breakthrough benefits, including greater system scalability, lowered total cost of ownership and manageability.

The Cheetah 15K.4 price-per-performance value, united with breakthrough benefits of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), makes it the optimal 3.5” drive for rock-solid enterprise storage. The Cheetah 15K.4 delivers the lowest-cost-per performance, enabling fast IOPS transactions with unmatched reliability. Seagate Savvio 10K.1 is the industry’s first 2.5” enterprise drive, making a variety of new high-IO, high-density storage solutions possible. Serial Attached SCSI’s point-to-point, full-duplex architecture and compact connectors are perfect matches for Seagate’s Savvio 10K.1 to enable lower-cost-of ownership, space efficient server and storage array platforms.

Serial Attached SCSI is the next step for the enterprise industry's storage I/O standard interface. SAS technology extends SCSI interface solutions beyond Ultra320 to the next-generation Direct Attach Storage (DAS) server and workstation markets while retaining device-level backward compatibility. SAS physical layer is compatible with Serial ATA, which enables users to establish storage systems with either SATA or SAS hard disk drives, or a combination of both. Boasting features that liberate SCSI from its parallel predecessor, Serial Attached SCSI delivers new levels of speed and connectivity while retaining the functionality and reliability of SCSI.

Seagate’s SAS-enabled Cheetah 15K.4 and Savvio 10K.1 are shipping now for qualification into OEM systems, with general availability set to occur simultaneously with the industry's other SAS solutions in approximately Q1 2005.