Bringing SCSI to Next Level

Adaptec's Ultra320 SCSI products, slated for release later this year, will be the first to include the company's Seamless Streaming Technology.

Adaptecs Ultra320 SCSI products, slated for release later this year, will be the first to include the companys Seamless Streaming Technology.

The Ultra320 reaches data transfer rates of 320MB per second, effectively doubling the speed of the Ultra160 SCSI systems used in high-end servers and workstations.

The Ultra160 SCSI uses the packetized SCSI protocol to reduce the protocol overhead during high-speed transfers, but the Ultra320 takes it up a notch. The Ultra320 products Seamless Streaming Technology will enable SCSI devices such as hard drives to stream multiple commands in a single connection.

This optimization technology will help to eliminate command latencies, allowing up to 512 commands to be quickly fetched from the command management queue.

As processor performance continues to accelerate, applications of the Ultra320 SCSI will greatly diminish I/O bottlenecks. Together with the arrival of the faster PCI-X bus technology that enables bus rates of more than 1GB per second, the Ultra320 is the next step in high-performance server and RAID storage systems.

Adaptec plans to release Ultra320 SCSI host bus adapters and RAID controllers using an ASIC dual-channel chip with the Seamless Streaming Technology later this quarter.