Summary

As disk drives are at the core of nearly all storage networking products, the interconnect technology that connects disk devices to their respective controllers can have a major influence on a product's capabilities. Traditionally, parallel SCSI and Fibre Channel disk drives have been the interconnects used in storage networking, although ATA and, more recently, SATA drives have been used successfully for certain applications.

The combination of tagged command queuing and overlapped I/Os with parallel SCSI and Fibre Channel interconnects makes them much more applicable for high-performance applications than ATA or SATA. However, many systems do not need this type of I/O performance and can run on much less expensive ATA or SATA drives.

As the newest interconnect, SATA appears to have the benefit of hindsight and a technology road map to add some of parallel SCSI's and Fibre Channel's features, such as native command queuing. It is not clear yet how successful SATA technology will be, but the cost advantages of using an improved desktop interconnect technology for low-throughput applications points to a bright future.