Phoenix (AZ) - Seagate demonstrated for the first time the interoperability between multiple Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) disc drives running within the same storage array.

Seagate demonstrated the technology at the Storage Networking World, using SATA drives and SAS devices, which will be available later this year. While the interoperability of SATA and SAS was shown previously by Maxtor at Serial Storage in a Box Technology Symposium in October 2003, Seagate says it "essentially demonstrated a final product" where multiple SAS and SATA drives work together in one box.

The combination of both technologies in one array will give IT Managers new possibilities to allocate specific drives for specific types of data. Seagate claims that consolidating drives using fewer, subsystems also could "save a substantial amount of both money and space, as well as reducing IT storage maintenance costs."

Serial Attached SCSI is widely expected to become the next standard I/O interface in the enterprise market. Building on existing Parallel SCSI technologies, SAS will address concerns of the limits of current transmission line architectures and the physical size of the connectors. The use of the SATA interface is seen as the solution to this problem allowing smaller formfactors in servers and workstations while conveniently providing access to ATA-type drives.

Seagate will ship its first 2.5 inch SAS drives in Q4 of this year.