Product Description
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1.5.3 Serial ATA Interfaces
The board provides six Serial ATA (SATA) connectors, which support one device per
connector.
1.5.3.1 Serial ATA Support
The ICH8’s Serial ATA controller offers six independent Serial ATA ports with a
theoretical maximum transfer rate of 3 Gbits/sec per port. One device can be installed
on each port for a maximum of six Serial ATA devices. A point-to-point interface is
used for host to device connections, unlike Parallel ATA IDE which supports a
master/slave configuration and two devices per channel.
For compatibility, the underlying Serial ATA functionality is transparent to the
operating system. The Serial ATA controller can operate in both legacy and native
modes. In legacy mode, standard IDE I/O and IRQ resources are assigned (IRQ 14
and 15). In Native mode, standard PCI Conventional bus resource steering is used.
Native mode is the preferred mode for configurations using the Windows* XP and
Windows 2000 operating systems.
NOTE
Many Serial ATA drives use new low-voltage power connectors and require adaptors or
power supplies equipped with low-voltage power connectors.
For more information, see:
http://www.serialata.org/.
For information about Refer to
The location of the Serial ATA connectors Figure 16, page 52
1.5.3.2 Serial ATA RAID
The ICH8 supports the following RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives)
levels:
• RAID 0 - data striping
• RAID 1 - data mirroring
• RAID 0+1 (or RAID 10) - data striping and mirroring
• RAID 5 - distributed parity
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