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SSA - technical definition

An IBM interface specification for a serial transport protocol based on a ring topology and operating in full duplex (FDX) at a maximum of 20 MBps per channel, with as many as two channels per cable. SSA maps into the pre-existing Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) and SSA devices are SCSI devices.The Transport Layer protocol is non-return-to-zero (NRZ) and utilizes 8B/10B encoding. See also 8B/10B, FDX, NRZ, protocol, ring topology, SCSI, serial, and Transport Layer.

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(Serial Storage Architecture) A fault tolerant peripheral interface from IBM that transfers data at 80 and 160 Mbytes/sec. SSA uses SCSI commands, allowing existing software to drive SSA peripherals, which are typically disk drives. Using a ring architecture that supports up to 128 devices, if one fails, the remaining devices continue to run. SSA distances are 25 meters over copper and 2.4 kilometers over fiber. SSA was designed to provide an alternative to Fibre Channel, but has not been as widely used. See SAS and SCSI.

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