Maxtor has announced that it is shipping Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard disk drives. Maxtor, who are the first US hard drive manufacturers to announce the availability of SAS harddrives, have claimed that this technology will enable customers to mix-and-match performance oriented SAS devices with the more regular (and cheaper) SATA drives.
The Maxtor Atlas SAS drive supports the standard 1.5 GByte per second SATA interface as well as the 3.0 GByte per second SAS interface. Current SCSI drives can be used in conjunction with the new drive by using an existing SCSI command set. Up to 16,000 devices can be installed per SAS domain.