Intel Developer Forum Spring 2003 - Technology Showcase

Intel's ICH5

The beauty of native Serial ATA in ICH5 is that the interface does not clog up the PCI bus nor is it limited by the 133MB/s bandwidth limitation of current 32-bit/33MHz PCI, which in theory will lead to better performance for Serial ATA devices.

ICH5 features two Serial ATA 150 channels as well as two conventional Parallel ATA channels:

Intel's ICH5

Another feature of this new ICH is Intel's new Serial ATA RAID; what's special about Intel's Serial ATA RAID is that, for starters, it is built into the ICH and will interface perfectly with Intel's Application Accelerator. Quite possibly the most attractive feature of the solution is that it will allow you to upgrade a single drive to a dual drive RAID-0 array, without reinstalling your OS.

The process is simple; you first setup your system with a single Serial ATA drive. When you're ready to move to RAID-0 you just add the new drive, and tell the Intel Application Accelerator utility that you'd like to create a RAID-0 array. Intel's software will take over and create the new striped array without causing any dataloss, which is something that we would've expected to see in the past from other IDE RAID vendors.

With Intel providing Serial ATA RAID support in their forthcoming ICH5, you can say goodbye to solutions from Silicon Image, Promise and Highpoint on motherboards. Interestingly enough, ICH5 will only support RAID-0 at launch.

We closed off with a look at Intel's 875 chipset