Edit Tools: Atto Technology ExpressSAS H680

Driver support for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Price: $595

While it's not necessary to have the latest and greatest in storage technology, it helps to keep on eye on trends. If at some point you have the money to invest, future-proofing is always ideal. One storage technology now reaching maturity is serial-attached SCSI (SAS). SAS builds upon tried-and-true SCSI software commands, but it adds serial communication to allow much higher speed data transfers with today's SATA drives and new SAS-type drives. Atto Technology takes claim as the first to market with the second-generation 6Gbps SAS host adapters, which work on computers employing the latest PCI Express 2.0 motherboards. Atto's H680, with eight external lanes of connectivity, is said to deliver up to 1200MBps throughput per SAS port in full-duplex mode.

www.attotech.com