Irreverence

posted on 13 May 2008 07:23

See update at end of article.

Remember FATA, Fibre-attached, technology-adapted drives? Well you can forget them, as Seagate has discontinued their manufacture. SAS has put paid to them.

FATA drives were used predominantly by HP but also IBM, as a way of putting Serial ATA (SATA) drives into Fibre Channel arrays. They were announced in April, 2004, and were SATA platters with a Fibre Channel interface, thus enabling them to be present in Fibre Channel arrays and provide the arrays with both tier 1 and tier 2 (nearline) storage.

At the time they were said to be half the cost of equivalent capacity Fibre Channel drives. Seagate was the only manufacturer although, at the time, Hitachi GST was thought to be a co-manufactuer.

Compellent CTO Larry Aszmann confirmed that: "FATA was discontinued a few months ago." It was technology that dead-ended.

SAS, with its coming 6Gbit/s interface, is looking to take over the Fibre Channel drive world and FATA has no place left to go.

UPDATE 30 May 2008

HP denies that FATA is out of the picture and defunct, with a spokesperson saying: " please re-iterate that HP is very committed to providing FATA drives. As an example, we just released the 1 TB FATA drives."

^{[Chris Mellor.]}