How many drives do you have in your desktop? Most people have just one, and because the additional cost and difficulty associated with adding and managing RAID can be a deterrent both at home and at the office, they have no mirroring. This is a pity, because with the monster capacity of drives these days, mirroring may be a good idea. If you think so, too, you"ll be as glad as I was to hear about a new chip from Silicon Image, which could finally open desktop computing to the world of RAID -- without the cost and aggravation.
You may have heard of Silicon Image: its chips are embedded in consumer electronics gear, storage components, and PCs. It may also be easy to make a connection between Silicon Image and PC graphic cards, but perhaps not everybody knows that the company"s storage division manufactures storage processors for SATA, which are used in applications such as bridges, port multipliers, HBAs, and motherboards.
Silicon Image was also the designer of SteelVine Architecture. According to one of the company"s white papers, SteelVine allows for "reliable, high-capacity, high-performance storage at a price that will not break the SMB IT budget developed for plug-and-play connectivity, and incorporating sophisticated on-chip management capabilities."
To better understand SteelVine, it helps to consider some of the products that it inspired, such as the SV2000, an external storage array with five SATA drives, and its logical complement, the SV- HBA3124, an HBA card that can connect both internal and external SATA storage.
During a conversation with product manager Conrad Maxwell, I learned about the latest addition to SteelVine: the SiI4723, a new SATA processor that Silicon Image recently announced at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
"It takes quite a sophisticated user to install a SATA RAID controller today," Maxwell says, explaining that the objective in designing the new chip was to make SATA RAID "work with no drivers and no software to configure."
The SiI4723 offers those capabilities by combining its RISC-based storage processor with several logical layers, including a virtualization engine, RAID processing, and ATA emulation. On the device side, the new chip has two ports to connect as many SATA drives using RAID 0, RAID 1, JBOD (just a bunch of disks), or the combined capacity of differently sized drives. Depending on the application, the working mode for the drives can be set via hardware (using jumpers, for example), or GUI. These options should give manufacturers flexibility in choosing the more practical approach for their products.
Whatever the setting, no software for SATA drivers is needed with the Sil4723 because the OS will recognize a single volume or two via the built-in ATA emulation. Target applications for the Sil4723 are motherboards for corporate desktops and external enclosures for SATA drives, Maxwell says.
Mass shipments are scheduled to begin in October, so it"s possible that new gear mounting for the chip may be on display for Christmas. Regardless, at a price of US$15 each in quantities of 10,000, the Sil4723 isn"t likely to add much to the cost of a motherboard or a controller.
Perhaps we"ll begin to see PC vendors shipping desktops and laptops with mirroring preset at the factory. I wouldn"t mind paying a little more for that, would you?
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