EKF SC3-LARGO - Serial ATA Interface (SATA)

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User Guide • SC3-LARGO • CompactPCI

Serial CPU Board • Intel

Core

5xxx Processor

Serial ATA Interface (SATA)

The SC3-LARGO provides a total of ten serial ATA (SATA) ports, derived from up to three independent

SATA controllers. Eight of these ports support data transfer rates of 6Gbps (600MB/s), 3Gbps

(300MB/s) or 1.5Gbps (150MB/s), the remaining two ports up to 3Gbps. SATA controllers are located

within the QM87 Platform Controller Hub that holds 6 SATA interfaces and in a separate SATA host

controller Marvell 88SE9230, providing four SATA ports, all 6Gbps capable.

Three of the QM87 ports are fed to the high speed expansion connector P-HSE. This connector allows

the installation of low profile expansion boards like C41-CFAST or C42-SATA to attach the popular

CFast cards or Micro SATA SSDs (1.8-inch) respectively. Another mezzanine is the C47-MSATA, a

carrier for two MSATA SSD modules.

The Marvell 88SE9230 is a SATA 6Gbps AHCI/RAID I/O controller connected via two PCI Express lanes

(1GB/s) to the QM87. It supports hardware RAID levels 0, 1 and 10. All of its SATA ports as well as the

three remaining QM87 ports are used to supply the CompactPCI

Serial SATA interfaces on the

backplane.

A LED named HD located in the front panel, signals disk activity status of any QM87 SATA devices

(green) or 88SE9230 devices (yellow).

Additionally a variety of side cards is available, suitable for mounting on the SC3-LARGO in a 4HP

(20.32mm) distance (resulting in 8HP front panel width for the assembly). Some of these side boards

can accommodate a SATA drive, e.g. a 2.5-inch SSD.

Available for download from Intel's web site are drivers for popular operating systems, e.g. Windows

7, Windows

8 and Linux.

Drivers and software to manage the RAID configuration of the 88SE9230 (Windows

application) is

provided by Marvell and can be downloaded from EKF’s website.