NEWZ: HP & Seagate Finally Release FATA Hard Drives

[Explorer]

• The new FATA disk drives for the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) family provide high-capacity, low-cost storage for data applications that do not require performance-oriented 10K and15K enterprise-class Fibre Channel (FC) disk drives...
  
  Based on disk drives from Seagate, the 400 gigabyte (GB) and 500 GB FATA drives from HP provide nearly double the capacity and cost approximately 50 percent less per gigabyte than high-performance FC drives...
  
  The new FATA drives will be offered with capacities of 400 GB and 500 GB using a dual-port, 2 gigabit/second (Gb/sec), FC interface. Using the 500 GB capacity, the HP StorageWorks EVA4000 will support 28 terabytes (TB), the HP StorageWorks EVA6000 will support 56 TB and the HP StorageWorks EVA8000 will support 120 TB of raw storage capacity...

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2005/050725a.html

 

[sechs]

Somebody want to translate this for me? Are these just fiber channel ATA drives?

 

[Computer Generated Baby]

Somebody want to translate this for me? Are these just fiber channel ATA drives?

Without getting my hands on one, I would have to say they are essentially 7200 RPM Seagate SATA hard drives drive with an integrated F-C optical bridge. The bridge translates physical and communications protocols between F-C and SATA so that they interface with existing (at this point, "legacy") Fibre Channel hardware.

These new drives -- both the interface and the mechanism -- have passed F-C validation; otherwise, at least the drive mechanisms themselves have been in use to some degree of time before the announcement.

The SATA tunneling announcement will affect more than hard drives, as F-C host bus adapters, switches, tape drives, and hard drive will all have to comply with SATA tunneling. SAS could do this right from the very beginning.