Tunneling SATA targets through fibre channel

A system for enabling SATA drives to be utilized in FC SANs is disclosed. To send SATA FISs to a SATA drive over a FC SAN, a host sends SCSI commands encapsulated in FC frames over a standard FC link to a Fiber Channel Attached SATA Tunneling (FAST) RAID controller, where the SCSI commands are de-encapsulated from the FC frames and translated to SATA FISs. The SATA FISs are thereafter encapsulated into FC frames. The IOC that performs these functions is referred to as a FAST IOC. The SATA-encapsulated FC frames are sent to multiple disk drive enclosures over another standard FC link. The FC frames are de-encapsulated by FAST switches in disk drive enclosures to retrieve the SATA FISs, and the SATA FISs are sent to the SATA drives over a SATA connection.