Adaptec Introduces SATA Adapter

Adaptec unveiled a two-port SATA adapter card that supports up to two SATA hard drives and RAID 0, RAID 1 and JBOD (non-RAID) capabilities, said Carvilla Dossett, RAID product marketing manager for the company's Storage Solutions Group.

The 1210SA offers a data-transfer rate of up to 1.5 Gbps per port, and supports bootable arrays, making it suitable as a boot device in small offices and home offices, said Dossett.

A separate JBOD-only version is expected to be released by the company's desktop solutions group in a couple of weeks, Dossett said.

The new SATA cards support Windows 2000 and XP and will support Windows Server 2003 when it is released, said Dossett. They also support Red Hat and SuSE Linux, she said.

Adaptec's plans call for a complete line of SATA adapters, including versions with zero-channel, eight-port, 12-port and 16-port capabilities, she said.

Because the 1210SA is a software RAID controller, it is aimed initially at the channel for building high-end PCs and sub-entry servers, Dossett said. Future versions, which will have a hardware controller and more ports as well as RAID 5 and RAID 10 support, will be aimed at OEMs, she said.

The 1210SA is now available and carries a list price of about $75, which is the same as the company's current 1200A two-channel ATA adapter.

Activity in the SATA storage space has started picking up as more vendors introduce products. Western Digital last month introduced what it calls the first enterprise-class SATA hard drive with 10,000-rpm speed and a five-year warranty.

Seagate, which was the first to ship SATA hard drives, last month introduced Native Command Queuing, a technology that enables the drive to reorder a set of incoming commands intelligently before accessing data and submitting it back to the host for action. The technology is designed to improve the drives' I/O performance.