The difference between SATA and FATA
What's the difference between SATA and FATA, in terms of performance as well as price?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

    When you register for SearchStorage.com, you’ll also receive targeted emails from my team of award-winning editorial writers. Our goal is to keep you informed on the hottest topics, the latest news and the biggest challenges you face as a storage professional today.

    Rich Castagna, Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchStorage.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchStorage.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

One of the vendors currently offering FATA (Hewlett-Packard) claims that price and performance is comparable for both their SATA and FATA disk offerings. It may first be useful to know that FATA is an ATA drive (also called IDE) with a Fibre interface attachment.

The questions then becomes, why switch if they are equivalent? One of the benefits is the ability to stick to only one protocol (i.e.: Fibre in this case) and still take advantage of lower-cost ATA technology. Another advantage is the ability to have two types of disk technology without having to buy two disk arrays.

Other vendors, such as EMC Corp., also offer the ability to intermix Fibre Channel and ATA disk technology within the same array, but chose to simply call it lower-cost. Slower-spinning disk and more will follow shortly from IBM and Hitachi Data Systems. These are other approaches that offer the ability to make use of both technologies without having to deploy multiple storage solutions.

What remains to be seen is how widely (and quickly) supported this new technological twist will be and how it will position with iSCSI which has been gaining momentum.

This was first published in August 2004