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As network infrastructure continues to evolve, there is a continuing demand for accessible, highly
available and manageable networked storage. Intel provides the storage building blocks that help the
industry implement cost-effective solutions that meet customer demand for intelligent and highly
available storage distributed anywhere in the network. Intel is building on its core competencies
in silicon, middleware, and I/O technologies to help the industry benefit from powerful transitions in
networked storage, by leading the development of open-industry standards, including Serial ATA
(SATA). The new inside-the-box disk interconnect, Serial ATA provides a series of compelling benefits
including performance headroom, thin/round cabling, board real estate savings, and software transparency
with legacy Parallel ATA (PATA). |
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The Intel® 31244 PCI-X to Serial ATA Controller is a fully integrated state-of-the-art SATA host controller that
enables storage equipment manufacturers to deliver SATA-based storage solutions now. The Intel
31244 Controller is targeted at embedded, external storage, NAS, PCI-X Host Bus Adapter cards and
RAID controllers. The Intel® 31244 PCI-X to Serial ATA Controller has 4 SATA ports running at 1.5 Gbps. The device is
compliant with the PCI-X 1.0a specification bus operating at 64-bits at 33/100/66MHz, allowing burst
data rates of up to 1064 MBps. Working in conjunction with the Intel® IOP321 I/O processor, the
Intel® 31244 PCI-X to Serial ATA Controller provides an ideal solution for developing hardware RAID applications.
For high-performance applications such as RAID and video streaming, all four SATA ports can be
configured to run in Direct Port Access Mode (DPA) where the data can be transferred from/to all
four disks simultaneously. DPA utilizes PCI-X memory space accesses rather than I/O space. Memory
space accesses, especially on Intel® Pentium® class host systems, are much more efficient
than I/O space accesses. I/O space accesses can cause pipeline flushes and stalls. By using PCI-X
memory space instead, the Intel® 31244 PCI-X to Serial ATA Controller provides performance gains in excess of performance
associated with current ATA technology.
The Intel® 31244 PCI-X to Serial ATA Controller is compliant with both SATA 1.0 and SATA II: By utilizing extensions to
the Serial ATA 1.0a specifications, the 31244 Controller is ideal for external/enterprise storage
applications. The key extensions supported include enhanced differential voltage for SATA backplane support, and
Activity LED for each SATA port to exhibit disk activity status.
The Intel® 31244 PCI-X to Serial ATA Controller is cost-effective for applications that require four (or multiples of four)
SATA ports. The chip comes in a small package (17 x 17 mm, 256 TE-PBGA) making it an ideal choice
for embedded or motherboard implementation. Additionally, for add-in card applications, up to 128
KB of firmware may be downloaded to the system from a Serial ROM interface on the controller. |
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