Adaptec has today announced details of a partnership with hard drive manufacturers Fujitsu, Hitachi, Maxtor and Seagate to build the industry's first Serial Attached SCSI products.

The Serial Attached SCSI interconnect is being positioned as the next generation of traditional SCSI, providing improved performance and scalability in high-density storage environments.

In addition, Serial Attached SCSI enables the use of long, thin cables and small connectors to improve chassis airflow and cooling.

It will also simplify cable routing and allow system builders to design smaller form factors.

Serial Attached SCSI storage systems are capable of delivering data transfer rates of 3Gbps. But Adaptec said that it aims to use its Raid technology to improve this to 12Gbps for use in bandwidth-intensive applications.

These would include mainline storage, video editing, and streaming video and audio in direct-attached, networked-attached and networked storage environments.

The product development initiative will ensure compatibility with both Serial Attached SCSI and Serial ATA disk drives. Demos are expected later this year with full rollout in 2004.

"Serial Attached SCSI reduces the footprint of enterprise storage connections to enable dense form factors and smooth the migration to server blades," said Mike Chenery, vice president of advanced products engineering at Fujitsu Computer Products of America.

Mike Wingert, executive vice president and general manager of the Server Products Group at Maxtor, added: "Serial ATA drives will meet the needs of customers requiring cost-effective capacity for near-line storage of email archives and other reference data.

"Serial Attached SCSI drives will deliver the highest levels of performance and reliability for bandwidth-intensive enterprise environments."