Silicon Image Introduces 'SATA Splitting'

[Joe]

Well Its Actually Virtualization

Merging all your data onto a single volume is ideal, but it is only possible if the new drive offers sufficient storage capacity. The more drives you add, the more you will have to manage. As you run out of ports, future upgrades require you to replace older drives. Some devices aren't as flexible: If you want to expand the storage capacity of a PVR, most devices require you to exchange the hard drive.

Ideally, users should be able to add hard drives to a system to increase the storage capacity or storage performance. This addition of storage should not involve configuration and management issues. Imagine if you could add external hard drives as you need them.

Now, there is a solution. Silicon Image has come up with the new SteelVine family of storage processors for SATA. These are powerful SATA sub-controllers for external drives, and they include a virtualization layer and a port multiplier. This way they appear like a disk drive to your SATA host controller, but they can map and manage additional, cascaded SATA drives. It sounds difficult, but it really isn't!

|Source :: Toms Hardware|

 

[Rastalovich]

In effect, u have a 200g SATA drive - no free ports. Chuck on their `thing/stuff` and u can patch another SATA drive to the existing one, and to the OS it looks like 1 drive but bigger ?

 

[Joe]

In effect, u have a 200g SATA drive - no free ports. Chuck on their `thing/stuff` and u can patch another SATA drive to the existing one, and to the OS it looks like 1 drive but bigger ?

yea They call it virtualisation

afiak it go can both ways A JBOD RAID or a splitter depending on ur H/W

If your SATA controller does not recognize PMs, it will run all attached hard drives as if they each were attached to a separate SATA port. PM-aware controllers know about the physical connection, but they still require additional logic to achieve Silicon Image's drive concatenation.

so disable PM detection in ur SATA and u have a splitter enable it (if supported) and u have a JBOD

nats JBOD/Concat modes are selectable using a config switch

 

[Toxcity]

Thats an awesome idea!

Nice find joe.

 

[Nagaru]

Wow seems really cool, especially since SATA has so much extra bandwidth.

 

[Rastalovich]

Wow seems really cool, especially since SATA has so much extra bandwidth.

That`s true enough, I did think it may slow access down considerably, but if they`re able to use the existing overhead, it`d be kewl.

Ooo I wanna try one out.

 

[PP Mguire]

Im sure they use the existing overhead. This looks more like SCSI imo.