"In today’s storage market we have several key technologies: Parallel ATA (PATA), Serial ATA (SATA; newcomer), SCSI, and Fibre Channel (FC). There are of course newer and more exotic technologies. iSCSI and Serial SCSI being two of them, but for the purpose of this report we will focus on the basic 4 core technologies. PATA has been around for a long time. We’ve seen the changes in the cabling and also in the rated “speed” of the drive. SATA is the real newcomer having been on the market in volume for less than 3 weeks at the time as of this review. It boasts a low pin count coupled with a high transfer speed for a consumer level devices. Currently though its transfer speeds are limited by the PCI Bus. SCSI has been the “high performance” king of all consumer, mid-level, and enterprise markets for the past decades. With its low seek times, the ability to read/write concurrently, and fast spindle speeds SCSI has delivered dependable performance for markets where storage is key. SCSI suffers from an acute problem, however how do you get SCSI arrays off-site or remote for SAN (storage area network) or NAS (network attached storage) applications?"

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