HP to Offer Low-Cost Fibre Channel Drives

   HP has announced plans to release a new class of disk drives that it calls Fibre Attached Technology Adapted (FATA). Codeveloped with Seagate Technology, the FATA drives provide low-cost, high-capacity Fibre Channel storage. HP is targeting FATA at enterprise environments where bulk storage is more important than access time. "By using more cost-effective Fibre Channel drives, IT managers will have the capability to run their mission-critical data together with their basic reference data and use the same common Fibre Channel infrastructure. This enables easier system management along with added flexibility and scalability," said Brian Dexheimer, executive vice president, worldwide global marketing, Seagate.
   FATA drives will be capable of up to 250GB of storage with a dual-port, 2GBps Fibre Channel interface. The Fibre Channel interface will make it easy to use the new drives in any existing Fibre Channel device. The drives will actually be typical Serial ATA-2 drives with an added Fibre Channel interface, so performance will be similar to the performance of low-cost ATA disk drives but will offer system resilience; Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) capability; optimized sequential addressing features; Fibre Channel protocol native data integrity; and error-event handling capability. The drives will begin to ship in July.