Via Adds Serial RAID Controller

[techfuzz]

VIA Press Release

Via Adds Serial RAID Controller - Article

"The combination of the new ultra fast dual channel serial ATA interface at 150MBytes/s, the flexibility of multi level RAID configurations and backwards compatibility with parallel ATA, delivers a whole new value proposition to the marketplace," said Richard Brown, director of marketing at VIA Technologies, Inc., in a statement. "We believe the VT6420 will propel Serial ATA toward mainstream market penetration in Q4 2003."

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[Lord Evermore]

Eh. Separate SATA controller chip from VIA, compared to an integrated SATA controller from Intel. May as well stick with proven Silicon Image controllers for all that, unless the VIA controller shows notable performance gains.

Nobody expects chipset integrated drive controllers to support RAID functions, so it's a bonus that Intel does RAID0. If VIA made an external controller chip that didn't support all those functions, they'd be laughed out of the industry. Intel could easily include those features if they wanted to, but they don't, and they don't want to make a stand-alone SATA controller.

 

[techfuzz]

I myself would prefer to see the SATA integrated into either the north of south bridges and it become a standard component for all computers, not just a luxary or optional piece. Adoption for SATA has been pretty slow thus far with the small availability of SATA hard drives available to the general public. Hopefully Seagate will buck that trend and get the ball rolling with the recent 80GB and 120GB models that people are just now seeing on the streets.

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[Lord Evermore]

ICH5R is Intel's next southbridge... and I'm sure both SiS and VIA are going to have it integrated into the southbridge at some point. Unfortunately their announcements all seem to indicate only 2 ports being supported directly by the chipset, so it's somewhat limited functionality. Of course, SATA-native optical devices haven't been announced, so support for a couple of hard drives may be all they care to implement at first.

 

[techfuzz]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
ICH5R is Intel's next southbridge... and I'm sure both SiS and VIA are going to have it integrated into the southbridge at some point. Unfortunately their announcements all seem to indicate only 2 ports being supported directly by the chipset, so it's somewhat limited functionality. Of course, SATA-native optical devices haven't been announced, so support for a couple of hard drives may be all they care to implement at first.

That may change here in the near future though. Silicon Image announced recently a new port multiplier technology to enable multiple devices. The Intel southbridge coming up only supports RAID 0 according to a couple of articles I've read. The VIA one supposedly has support for RAID 1 as well.

SI Press Release - SATA Port Multiplier

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