Serial Ata (Sata) Support - Intel SE7520AF2 Technical Product Specification

Functional Architecture
The SATA function in the ICH5-R has dual modes of operation to support different operating
system conditions. In the case of Native IDE enabled operating systems, the ICH5-R has
separate PCI functions for serial and parallel ATA. To support legacy operating systems, a
single PCI function is available for both the serial and parallel ATA ports. The MAP register
provides the ability to share PCI functions. When sharing is enabled, all decode of I/O is done
through the SATA registers. Device 31, Function 1 (IDE controller) is hidden by software writing
to the Function Disable Register (D31, F0, offset F2h, bit 1), and its configuration registers are
not used. The SATA Capability Pointer Register (offset 34h) will change to indicate that MSI is
not supported in combined mode.
The ICH5-R SATA controller features two sets of interface signals that can be independently
enabled or disabled. Each interface is supported by an independent DMA controller. The ICH5-
R SATA controller interacts with an attached mass storage device through a register interface
that is equivalent to that presented by a traditional IDE host adapter. The host software follows
existing standards and conventions when accessing the register interface and follows standard
command protocol conventions.
SATA interface transfer rates are independent of UDMA mode settings. SATA interface transfer
rates operate at the maximum speed for the bus, regardless of the UDMA mode reported by the
SATA device or the system BIOS. The SATA interface from the ICH5-R supports data transfer
rates up to 1.5 Gb/s (150 MB/s).
3.4.6.1 Intel® Embedded Server RAID Technology
The Intel® Server Board SE7520AF2 enables SATA RAID known as the Intel® Embedded
Server RAID Technology. This solution is available via the 82801ER ICH5 R (ICH5R), and
offers data stripping for higher performance (RAID Level 0), alleviating disk bottlenecks by
taking advantage of the dual independent SATA controllers integrated in the ICH5R. In addition,
it offers data mirroring for fault tolerance (RAID Level 1). This solution does not result in the loss
of PCI resources (request/grant pair) or add-in card slot.
Intel RAID Technology functionality requires the following items:
ICH5-R
Intel® RAID Technology Option ROM (enabled in BIOS Setup F2)
Intel® Application Accelerator RAID Edition drivers, most recent revision
Two SATA hard disk drives
Note: The Intel® Embedded Server RAID Technology can be enabled in system BIOS Setup
under IDE Configuration Sub-menu (Configure S-ATA as RAID = Enabled). Once S-ATA is
configured as RAID and S-ATA drives are present, the user can access the S-ATA RAID BIOS
configuration to set/change attributes by pressing <Ctrl+E> during POST. Intel RAID
Technology is not available when the SATA controller is in Legacy Mode.
3.4.6.2 SATA RAID Option ROM
The Intel® RAID Technology for SATA Option ROM provides a pre-operating system user
interface for the Intel RAID Technology implementation and provides the ability for an Intel®
RAID Technology volume to be used as a boot disk as well as to detect any faults in the Intel®
RAID Technology volume(s) attached to the Intel RAID controller.
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Intel order number C77866-003
Intel® Server Board SE7520AF2 TPS
Revision 1.2