Serial Ata Interface (Sata); Pci Express® Interface - EKF SC2-PRESTO CompactPCI User Manual

User Guide • SC2-PRESTO • CompactPCI

Serial ATA Interface (SATA)

The SC2-PRESTO provides a total of ten serial ATA (SATA) ports, derived from 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
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 SC2-PRESTO 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.
PCI Express® Interface
The SC2-PRESTO is provided with several PCI Express (PCIe) lanes for I/O expansion. Sixteen PCI Express
lanes, originating from the Core
Serial. These two links consists of eight lanes with transfer rates of up to 8Gbps (PCI Express Gen 3).
The QM87 offers a total of eight PCI Express ports supporting PCIe Gen 2 speed (5GT/s). Four of them
form the upstream link to a PCI Express switch. The output ports (downstream ports) of the PCIe
switch are connected to the CompactPCI
expansion interface connector P-PCIE (four lanes) and to two of the Ethernet controllers (i210IT).
Two small DIP switches (DS-P) located on the backside of the board are used to configure different
lane widths to each of both downstream interfaces and to choose the interface transfer rate. Possible
settings are
< Six links x 1 to CompactPCI
< Six links x 1 to CompactPCI
< 2.5GT/s or 5GT/s transfer speed
See section "Configuration PCI Express Switch (DS-P)" for details.
© EKF
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Serial CPU Board • Intel® Core
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processor, are building the two fat pipes defined by CompactPCI
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Serial connectors P4/P5 (six lanes), to the local PCIe
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Serial P4/P5, two links x 1 to i217IT and a single link x 4 to P-PCIE
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Serial P4/P5, two links x 1 to i217IT and four links x 1 to P-PCIE
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Serial SATA interfaces on the
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