WD's Raptor Still Stands Alone
A much more likely scenario is that companies aside from Western Digital have a vested interest in SCSI drives. This means that pushing SATA would not be prudent, especially as an enterprise level drive. A quick look through Maxtor's web site shows us that their enterprise level drives are the Atlas (15K and 10K) line of SCSI drives as well as the MaxLine series, which are 7200 RPM SATA drives. Seagate has the Cheetah, Savvio, and NL35 lines, which reflect a similar agenda. Western Digital, who lacks an available SCSI line, has been able to develop their SATA drives, something which may hurt them with certain applications, like servers, but has made them a big hit with consumers. Even so, they promote their higher end SATA drives, like the Raptor 150GB WD1500AD and Caviar RE2 WD4000YR, as being enterprise level.
Seagate and Maxtor's investment is SCSI has led to another reason why they have not released a 10K SATA drive: serial attached SCSI (SAS). This interface should allow for very high speed data transfer and is in some ways compatible with SATA, though not interchangeable. SAS uses three transfer protocols: serial ATA tunneling (STP), serial SCSI (SSP), and serial management (SMP) which allow a device to work with SATA disk drives, SAS drives, and SAS expanders (etc). SAS features full-duplexing with link aggregation, 3.0 Gb/s transfer speeds (at introduction, up to 10.0 Gb/s expected), and options like dual port drives and multi-initiator availability.
SAS represents a major advancement in drive development and while it may not have an impact on home users, it is reason enough for companies to focus their development on this interface as opposed to standard SATA drives. SAS drives as currently available though their popularity still has a long way to go. While this may be a big deal for your data center, home performance enthusiasts have little reason to get excited. Considering the cost of this interface and the requirements, SATA is still the best choice for consumers.