NASA Could Launch SATA Trend

"It's possible to configure any RAID set," says Wayne Wright, director of the NASA project, "but we basically used EtherDrive to build a RAID 10 array using low-cost, off-the-shelf 400-GB IDE disk drives."

This is a major win for SATA technology, especially when you consider that the NASA project generates 40 GB of data "per flight day"--about 27 MB per minute.

If RAID can provide SATA with comparable reliability, then its cost is significantly less than FC or SCSI drives. Its data density is in the same range. So, all things being roughly equal, enterprises will have a hard time justifying the cost of higher-end disk drives, and many of them will turn to SATA--just as NASA did.