Storage Interfaces in brief - part1

In order to understand the storage systems or Devices, it is important to understand the disk drives, the most common building block of system systems are disk drive interface technologies.
Looking at the disk drive industry today, the interface type divides the market into 3 broad categories:
° The low-end PC market, with relatively low performance and reliability but at very economical price, dominated by IDE,ATA & SATA interfaces;
° The mid-range enterprise market, with higher performance and reliability, serviced by SATA, SCSI & SAS interfaces;
° The high-end enterprise application market, with the highest performance, reliability and scalability, provided by Fibre Channel, SATA, SAS Drives interfaces.
It is important to keep in mind that these disk drive interfaces have gone through several generations of evolution (IDE/ATA/EIDE/UDMA/Ultra-ATA, Narrow/Wide SCSI-1/2/3) and are still evolving rather quickly. Serial ATA (SATA) is emerging to replace ATA for higher performance. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) was invented to be the next generation SCSI interface.
Fibre Channel is evolving from 1Gbit/s to 2Gbit/s to 4Gbit/s and 10Gbit/s to satisfy the ever increasing demand for higher bandwidth.
At present, the Most imprtant drive interfaces being implemented are SATA, SCSI, SAS and Firbe Channel.

Type of Devices designed using Interfaces:
Hard Disks (IDE/ATA/SATA/SCSI/SAS/FC).
Internal RAID Controllers (IDE/ATA/SATA/SCSI/SAS/FC) Such as Adaptec, Promise technologies, LSIlogic (& so on)RAID controllers mainly used in DAS environment
Host Bus Adapters (SCSI/SAS/FC).
JBODs & Enclosures (SATA/SCSI/SAS/FC).
External RAID Controllers (SATA/SCSI/SAS/FC) such as EMC2, HP, IBM, LSIlogic, NetApp (& so on) SAN & NAS raid boxes majorly used in SAN & NAS environment.
Cables & Connectors (IDE/SATA/SCSI/SAS/FC).
Hubs & Switches (SAS/FC).