Maxtor Ships Atlas Hard Drive Family With Serial Attached SCSI Interface

(Auszug aus der Pressemitteilung)

MILPITAS, Calif., June 29 – Maxtor Corporation

(NYSE: MXO) announced today it is now shipping the Atlas(R) family of disk
drives, the fastest drives in their class(1), with the latest enterprise-class
interface technology — Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). The SAS interface allows
SAS and SATA disk drives to be configured in the same enclosure, enabling
customers to mix and match high-performance Atlas drives with high-capacity
MaXLine(R) SATA drives to meet a broad range of price, performance and
capacity requirements. Maxtor pioneered the use of high-capacity ATA disk
drives in nearline and midline applications with its MaXLine drives, the de
facto standard in this market.

„Maxtor with their new Atlas SAS disk drives is among the leading vendors
helping to make the benefits of SAS — increased performance, scalability and
cost-effectiveness — a reality for customers,“ said Mark Pollard, vice
president of marketing at Adaptec. „The breadth of Maxtor’s product line
should help customers match system configurations with their application
requirements.“

„We currently have Atlas SAS drives in qualification with global OEMs and
system vendors,“ said Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing, core
products at Maxtor. „We expect those customers to complete testing soon,
followed by volume shipments. The Atlas SAS drives, coupled with our MaXLine
SATA drives, combine to give Maxtor the industry’s broadest SAS/SATA
enterprise drive portfolio.“

Featuring a data transfer rate of 3.0Gb/s, the SAS interface brings
together the best features of other enterprise interfaces including:

• Dual ports — increases system availability by providing two data paths to a drive
• Multi-initiator capability — enables multiple hosts to access a drive simultaneously
• Point-to-point connectivity — improves system performance and fault isolation capabilities
• Scalable bandwidth — via wide ports
• Scalability — more than 16,000 devices per SAS domain
• Full duplex capability — allows drives to simultaneously send and receive for two different IO operations
• Rate matching — supports 1.5Gb/s SATA and 3.0Gb/s SAS devices for optimal performance
• IOPS performance — up to 128 queue depth support
• SCSI investment protection — employs SCSI command set to maintain compatibility with existing SCSI infrastructure
• Compatibility with SATA devices

SAS and SATA enterprise drives are complementary storage elements ideal
for the new SAS-based common infrastructure. SAS drives are designed for the
most demanding, mission critical applications while SATA drives are well
suited for nearline and other less demanding small and medium business
applications.

Maxtor is a founding member of the Serial Attached SCSI Working Group that
authored the first draft of the SAS standard now managed by the ANSI T10
standards body. Maxtor has worked extensively with leading system and
component suppliers to test compatibility of Atlas SAS drives with their
products. For more information on SAS including technical documentation and
white papers visit http://www.maxtor.com/sas .