Intel Developer Forum Spring 2002 - Day 2

Serial ATA RAID

At every IDF there is always a demonstration of Serial ATA, and usually the demonstration consists of showing off how small the cables can be and what sorts of transfer rates can theoretically be achieved. This time however we got something a bit different as there was a demo of Serial ATA RAID using Intel's IOP321 I/O processor.

The IOP321 is an XScale based I/O processor that is perfectly suited for performing the XOR operations necessary to calculate parity data for RAID 5 arrays. Operating at either 400 or 600MHz the IOP321 is supposedly quite well suited for these types of RAID arrays with 1.6GB/s of internal data movement bandwidth and a DDR memory controller for external memory.

The use of this I/O processor is only necessary for RAID 5 as creating the parity data can become very compute intensive thus eating up a large amount of CPU clock cycles, making a dedicated I/O processor perfect for the job. It's still too early to find Serial ATA in the mass market, much less Serial ATA RAID, but it was an interesting demonstration of the technology nonetheless and a reminder that even when ATA support is pulled from motherboards there will always be room for RAID controllers on-board.