According to John Howell, product manager: Pinnacle Storage at Pinnacle Micro, the SATA standard offers greater flexibility, capacity and reliability at competitive pricing.

"SATA cables are more flexible, thinner and usually less bulky than ribbon cables required for conventional drives, making them easier to integrate into servers," he says.

"Moreover, SATA offers a 50% increased burst rate operating at 150Mbps. Most Independent Software Vendors have already certified the SATA AIT Turbo drives, and the standard sees growing adoption through major brand server vendors."

SATA AIT Turbo drives are claimed to be a key component in enabling and driving the industry's efforts to achieve a true SATA-based disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) architecture.

Designed to unite disk and tape, along with the capabilities of SATA, they are said to be a great boon for budget-constrained, performance-starved storage administrators, who say that tape storage, coupled with hard disk drives in D2D2T configurations, provides the best attributes of disk, with the economy and scalability of tape.

Howell says that SATA AIT Turbo drives offer a wide range of capacity and performance options. AIT-2 Turbo drives feature an 80GB native storage capacity and a fast 12MBps sustained transfer rate, he adds.

AIT-1 Turbo is designed to deliver 40GB native storage capacity (104GB compressed) with a 6MBps sustained native transfer rate.

AIT-2 Turbo drives also offer WORM capability, allowing small to mid-size companies to easily deploy best practices to assist them in their compliance efforts, he continues.