First 2.5-inch SATA Drives On the Way

Fujitsu Computer Products of America (FCPA) has grand
designs for its small
form factor hard drives these days, and now the
subsidiary of the Japanese
technology giant is pressing forward with its 2.5-inch
hard drives for
mobile products such as laptops and consumer
electronics devices.


Mike Chenery, vice president of advanced product
engineering for San Jose,
Calif.’s FCPA, said Fujitsu is pushing to become first
to market with
2.5-inch mobile drives based on Serial ATA technology, with its new Fujitsu MHT-BH.

The technology is being created for storage markets
that can take advantage
of higher performance, higher capacity and smaller
footprint hard disk
drives.


Similar to the logic of employing thin blade servers
to power computing
resources, the idea for smaller form factor disk
drives is rooted in the
ongoing trend to conserve space, power and costs in a
data center. The trick is to make them smaller,
while at the same time
ensuring that the drives can handle enterprise-class
data.


Chenery said early iterations of the little drives,
dubbed SATA Extended
Duty Mobile 2.5-inch drives, are being offered to
original equipment
manufacturers of laptops for testing. But ultimately,
the engineer said he
hopes his drives will power high density applications
such as storage
blades, video servers and compact RAID systems in the
next few years.


Two main features of the mobile drives include native
Serial ATA II
interface support and native command queuing, which
provides a 30 percent
bump in performance by allowing 32 instructions to be queued and reordered by the hard disk controller. Ideally, laptops would boot up
one minute faster than
current times.


Fujitsu MHT-BH was developed with the support of Marvell Semiconductor, whose single chip Serial ATA SOC eliminates the need for a bridge chip providing the benefits of a Serial ATA interface. Qualification samples will be available in April 2004.


Serial technology-based products
are broadly replacing
their parallel brethren for a number of reasons,
including cost, performance
and speed.


Fujitsu competitors in this increasingly competitive
space include Seagate,
Toshiba and Hitachi
and while each have different shares
of the large market,
Chenery said Intel holds the true key to the SATA
space.


The chipmaker is currently developing “back-to-school”
timed chipsets for
notebooks and other devices that can handle serial
technologies. Those are slated for release in August
or September of 2004.

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