FATA
Hard Drive Recovery - FATA
Fibre Channel ATA (FATA) is a hybrid hard drive that combines Fibre Channel and ATA technologies. FATA drives were introduced by HP in 2005. FATA drives feature a Fibre Channel connector that enables the FATA drive to be used where conventional Fibre Channel drives are connected.
FATA drives are based on disk drives from Seagate. HP has released 400 gigabyte (GB) and 500 GB FATA drives. The FATA drives also share the same Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) drive enclosure with FC high-performance disk drives, thus extending the value of EVAs.
FATA drives offer the same performance and capacity as standard ATA drives - thanks to the ATA drive mechanism used in these drives. They are cheaper and are aimed at dropping the cost of Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs). According to HP, FATA drives offer a 50 percent or greater savings at the same capacity compared to Fibre Channel drives.
The integrated mechanism provided in the FATA drives enable end users who might be tempted to mix Fibre Channel and ATA hard drives on a SAN to build both their primary and their secondary storage on Fibre Channel technologies.
According to HP, the FATA drives addresses the “tiered storage needs by providing increased flexibility to segment reference data, such as infrequently accessed archived e-mail or medical records and imaging archives, as well as frequently accessed data such as financial transactions.”
