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SysOpt > News > Silicon Image Rolls New Features Into Upcoming Series of RAID Controllers

When it comes to the components inside your PC, chances are that your RAID controller isn't the first that springs to mind. However, some exciting improvements in motherboard capabilities could be just around the corner, thanks to a revamped product line from one of the chips' leading makers.

Silicon Image, a player in the drive controller space (as well as in TV processors) this week announced the new line of its SteelVine SATA RAID controllers, complete with some ambitious new features.

The three new controllers, SiI 5723, SiI 5734 and SiI 5744 -- which Silicon Image calls storage processors -- support SATA 3.0, eSATA, and USB 2.0 host interfaces, as well as RAID 0 and RAID 1, concatenation and JBOD arrays.

They also boast a new, very simple, but unique means of adding capacity to a system's concatenated array: daisy-chaining additional drives.

This "cascading capacity expansion" arrangement enables additional drives to be connected to each other via 3.0Gb/sec. eSATA. This chain of drives, in turn, is either linked directly to the host PC controller via SATA or eSATA, or via USB 2.0, an option in the two higher-end models of the processors.

"You put one [storage processor] on a motherboard or an external box," said Conrad Maxwell, Silicon Image’s senior product line manager for SteelVine products. "You hook up a drive... when that drive fills up, you go out and buy another," which you connect via USB or eSATA. That new drive "can automatically concatenate to the host, so [the host] automatically gets bigger."

With current drive capacities, up to three terabytes of data can be supported on a single system based on one of the new controllers, Silicon Image.

The cascading capacity expansion setup supports hot-swapping new drives into the array (removing drives requires going through the array's configuration interface) without the need for a restart or reformatting. Additionally, drives of any size and make are supported, as long as they come with a compatible controller.

Another feature built into the new storage processors is support for single-button backup (similar to drives like, say, the Maxtor OneTouch) that's entirely hardware-based. Handling the backups in hardware means they are synchronized in the background -- independent of drivers, OS and CPU. This setup enables usage scenarios like the automatic synchronization of a notebook PC drive with a second drive that's connected to a docking station.

The storage processors' auto-backup features also support a scenario that Silicon Image dubs "Mirror Later Mode," in which a second drive can be added to a one-drive PC, and the system will automatically detect and set-up a mirrored RAID array without data loss.

A third feature offered on the new chips is "drive locking," which enables users to password-protect all drives.

Compared to traditional means of integrating RAID into PC setups, the new SteelVine approach is "easier to install, and easy to expand -- it just works," Maxwell said. "Put it in motherboards, a user can add expansion later. It offers increased security... and you can use the chip to bundle two drives together and make them look like one."

Three new models of storage processors
The SiI 5723 is aimed at the basic motherboard market, as well as areas like personal video recorders. It lacks the on-board USB support (logically, since USB is a poor choice for connecting internal drives) but supports the daisy-chaining capacity-expansion feature.

The mid-range SiI 5734 -- designed for the standalone, single-drive enclosure market -- and the top-of-the-line SiI 5744 processor, targeted at digital home theater and storage appliances, each support USB. This enables a daisy chain of stand-alone drives to be linked via USB to a 5723-equipped motherboard, or to a 5744-equipped standalone storage appliance, such as a dual-drive networked storage device.

The higher-end SiI 5744 also supports SAFE33 and SAFE50 modes -- combined RAID 1 and RAID 0 environments that automatically retain either 30 percent or 50 percent of available storage as a mirrored, fault-tolerant partition. The remainder is striped across all available drives. The ratio of mirrored-to-striped capacity remains the same even as new drives are added via eSATA.

Compared to the previous-generation Silicon Image SiI 4723 and SiI 4726 devices, the company also said the new products were lower-power and lower-cost, despite offering more features. The new models also add USB 2.0 support, a first-time feature for the SteelVine line.

Other features include NCQ emulation, RAID 1 drive racing (enabling the quickest drive to produce sought-after data) and, for OEMs, a customizable GUI.

Maxwell said he expects the new chips to prove a compelling offer for OEMs and system builders.

"Our goal was to take what was complex enterprise storage stuff and make it simple for people to use, so they wouldn't need to call a million times to set it up," he said. "All the software is inside the chip -- it's easy to use, reliable, and very, very fast."

He added that Silicon Image is in talks with motherboard and consumer electronics vendors to launch products based on the chips, which could come as early as January 2007.

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