Adaptec Introduces Serial ATA RAID Controllers

As mounting evidence that serial technologies are gaining momentum over their parallel brethren in the storage industry, Adaptec Monday launched a Serial ATA (SATA) product family that features motherboard
solutions and RAID cards to connect PCs and servers to storage devices.

Short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, RAID is a category of disk drives (in which Milpitas, Calif.’s Adaptec happens to be a leader) that employs two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance.

According to Carvilla Dossett, RAID Product Marketing Manager, Storage Solutions Group, Adaptec, the company is working with major disk drive makers,
resellers, and original equipment manufacturers to drive Serial ATA adoption.

Serial ATA is quickly becoming a preferred method of device-to-device connections over the older, more established Parallel ATA technology, which often involves a number of thick, bulky lines. This, IT folks are saying, is too messy for constrained environments, which is part of the reason why businesses and vendors are eschewing Parallel ATA for its Serial ATA cousin.

Dossett told internetnews.com Adaptec’s new SATA product family, per customer demand, enables the use of longer, thinner cables and smaller
connectors compared to parallel technology, which improves chassis airflow and cooling, simplifies cable routing, and allows system builders to design smaller form factors.

Adaptec Serial ATA RAID 1210SA is a 2-port card that brings RAID and up to 1.5 Gigabit-per-second performance to home PCs, workstations and smaller
servers. The 1210SA features Adaptec’s mirroring and striping technology, HostRAID, which boosts performance of bandwidth-intensive applications such
as video and audio streaming, while its mirroring capabilities provide disk backup to protect personal data.

Adaptec’s Serial ATA RAID controllers feature browser-based management software, which allows end users to monitor and configure RAID subsystems
through the Web.

Adaptec also introduced SATAConnect, a 2-port controller with transfer speeds of up to 1.5 Gigabits per second for desktop PCs for consumers. SATAConnect serves as a connection to hard drives with the purpose of enhancing access to bandwidth-heavy applications, such as video, audio, and games.

The low per-megabyte cost of SATA drives makes them cost-effective for servers and workstations as well as for disk-based backup applications.

The Adaptec Serial ATA RAID 1210SA will begin shipping to resellers and major distributors later this month at $75. Adaptec SATAConnect will be available on May 1 in retail stores CompUSA and MicroCenter for $49.99.

This story originally appeared on Internet News.

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