SSA was IBM's equivalent to FC-AL, and it lost out during standardization wars, IIRC. So a number of people use FC-AL, notably Sun, and FC-AL drives frequently appear on the surplus market (I don't believe I've ever seen an SSA drive) and even at Fry's occasionally, but only IBM uses SSA.

I don't know enough to compare FC-AL and SSA, so don't ask.

My internal knowledge of hard drive parts is based on the parts I've seen, mainly HSA's. Thus, my quality comments were based on the mechanical quality of the parts I've seen (view from inside), not on interface abilities, reliability, etc. Although I've picked up a fair amount of general knowledge (e.g. from IDEMA magazine, DiskCon, customers, etc), I'm not a hard drive designer. OTOH, I'm pretty sure, for example, that the Seagate SCSI engineers don't know much about the Seagate IDE drives (with the possible exception of the IDE Barracuda models if they share the same hardware).

My interests in RAID are unrelated to my work. I'm interested in RAID 5 controllers for home (maybe if the economy picks up) and small business. SSA and FC-AL are too pricey. IDE is a possibility, but I'll have to see a lot of good comments (e.g. on StorageReview.com) before I'll trust 3-ware. Promise and Adaptec are also possibilities. As I said before, I'm tired of PC stuff that half works. BTW, the Mylex SCSI RAID boards appear to be about the same price as the 3-ware IDE controllers.

As far as future greatness goes, well, my standard answer is: "I'll believe it when I can see it at Fry's". A lot of products (not just from MS) never make it out of the vapor (Linear Technologies, for example, had an analog chip that they had spec sheets for, advertised, and engineers started to design with -- but the chip never made it to production. So, a common EE rule is "If it's not in the DigiKey catalog, don't use it.")

Tony