Following the announcement of Western Digital’s 12 gigabits-per-second (Gbps) SAS solid state drive – a first of its kind – last week, Seagate Technology spilled the bean that it will be demonstrating a 12Gbps SAS solid-state drive (SSD) at the SCSI Trade Association Technology Showcase this week at the Hyatt Hotel in Santa Clara, California. Seagate’s new Pulsar.2 SSD is “dual-ported” (for resiliency), which means that there are two I/O paths into the drive, so if one path fails, the drive won’t be inaccessible.
Seagate’s implementation of the 12Gbps SAS is fully compatible with controllers and other technologies from PMC-Sierra and LSI – two of the major host bus adapter and expander vendors. Both Seagate and Western Digital said that computer systems using 12Gbps SAS technology will start hitting the market in 2013. Drives using the 12Gbps SAS interface can be used in 6Gbps systems as they are backward-compatible with all previous generations of SAS speeds. The 12Gbps SAS standard is expected to be finalized by the end of the year.
Update May 9 2012, 1pm PT: Seagate has reached out to say that there was an error in their press release, and that the next generation of Seagate SSDs was *not* the Pulsar.2, which should still be considered to be a “technology demonstration” at this point.