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W O R K S H O P

Making the Case for Both Disk and Tape

March 5, 2003
By Steven Schuchart Jr.

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ATA's Big Comeback

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Watch Your Backup
	ATA's Big Comeback

ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) technology has finally shaken its bad reputation as an unreliable interface for storage devices. While SCSI and Fibre Channel drives are built with longevity and reliability in mind, that wasn't always the case for ATA. But the quality of ATA devices has much improved, and ATA and its immediate successor, Serial ATA, are now giving SCSI and Fibre Channel drives a run for their money. Although ATA is still slower than SCSI and Fibre Channel--anywhere from 50 Mbps to 150 Mbps--it's becoming more popular as an inexpensive backup and recovery option.

The speed gap, however, has gradually been narrowing over the past several years. Low-end drives have become faster and their capacity has increased. These low-cost ATA drives with huge capacity led to the development of today's D2D (disk-to-disk) near-line backup devices and an explosion in the NAS (network-attached storage) market. D2D vendors are including interfaces on their arrays to handle direct Fibre Channel connections to the SAN or SCSI connections, so ATA has finally found its way into the data center.