Seagate's announcement comes on the heels of Western Digital's release of the , which doubles the hardware interconnect throughput over the SAS interface currently used by most products. Seagate, however, did not say when the drive would ship.

As with all enterprise-class SAS drives -- both hard drives and SSDs -- Seagate's new Pulsar.2 SSD is dual-ported to resiliency, which means there are two I/O paths into the drive so that in case one path fails, the drive won't be inaccessible.

Both Western Digital and Seagate say that computer systems using 12Gbps SAS technology should start hitting the market in 2013, with general availability in the second half of that year.

Drives using the 12Gbps SAS interface can be used in 6Gbps systems as they are backward-compatible with all previous generations of SAS speeds. The 12Gbps SAS standard is expected to be finalized by the end of the year.

Seagate's implementation of 12Gbps SAS is fully compatible with controllers and other technologies from PMC-Sierra and LSI, two of the leading host bus adapter and expander vendors.