Following Western Digital's announcement last week, Seagate today also unveiled plans to demonstrate solid-state drives operating at 12 gigabits per second at the SCSI Trade Association (STA) Technology Showcase this week. Seagate will show Pulsar.2 solid-state drives working with the new 12Gb/s SAS standard at the showcase, taking place at the Hyatt Hotel in Santa Clara, Calif. on May 9, 2012. The new standard doubles the data throughput of industry-standard drives equipped with the enhanced SAS interface, enabling much faster server and storage solutions.

The 12Gb/s SAS standard is also compatible with hard disk drives. These can be integrated within existing infrastructures using 6Gb/s SAS because the new faster SAS standard is backwards compatible with all previous generations of SAS speeds. Seagate's implementation of 12Gb/s SAS is fully compatible with controllers and other technologies from PMC-Sierra and LSI, two of the leading Host Bus Adapter and Expander vendors.

The 12Gb/s SAS standard is currently stable and expected to be finalized by the end of the year. Products based on the 12Gb/s standard will start to hit in the market in 2013 with general availability in the second half of the year.