Adaptec announced that Seagate has combined Unified Serial Controllers from Adaptec with its own Cheetah 15K 146GB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives to deliver a SAS Evaluation Kit to Seagate system builders and resellers. Adaptec Unified Serial Controllers -- the Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI RAID 4800SAS and 4805SAS -- support both Serial ATA and SAS disk drives to provide system builders the flexibility to meet broad customer application requirements as well as varying performance, capacity and price levels.

The Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI RAID 4800SAS and 4805SAS are part of a new family of Unified Serial Controllers from Adaptec that have been tested and optimized to work with low-cost, high-capacity Serial ATA disk drives, high-performance SAS disk drives or a combination of both. Adaptec Unified Serial Controllers leverage the same software management interface to manage RAID data volumes, disk utilization, provisioning, diagnostics and storage expansion populated with SATA and SAS drive types. These solutions also offer advanced data protection features, including dual disk drive failure protection (RAID 6) and hot space (RAID 5EE). By choosing both the 4800SAS and 4805SAS, Seagate is giving its resellers a choice between the PCI-X or PCI Express (PCIe) interface.