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1. Introduction
This PCI Host Adapter is a PCI controller board which can upgrade your desktop
computer to have dual independent Serial ATA Channels to support RAID 0 and RAID 1
features, three 1394 ( FireWire ) ports and four USB2.0 / USB1.1 ports.
The board supports a 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus revision 2.2, 1394 transfer rate of 400 Mb/s,
USB transfer rate of 1.5Mb/s, 12Mb/s, 480Mb/s and the Serial ATA Generation 1
transfer rate of 1.5 Gb/s (150 MB/s).
It comes completely with drivers for Windows.
RAID, Redundant Array of Independent Disks
,
greatly enhances two main areas of data
storage: performance and data integrity. By using RAID 0, also known as Striping,
performance of sustained data transfer rates is greatly enhanced by simultaneously
writing data to 2 drives. The second benefit of RAID is data redundancy. RAID 1,
Mirroring, writes identical data on two drives, thus protecting the data from a disk failure. If,
for any reason, one drive were to fail, your data is secure and available from the mirrored
second drive.
1.1. Features
1.1.1. PCI Interface
Compliant with PCI Specification, revision 2.2.
Compliant with PCI IDE Controller Specification, revision 1.0.
Compliant with Programming Interface for Bus Master IDE Controller revision 1.0.
32 bit, 33Mhz fully compliant PCI host interface.
Integrated PCI DMA engines.
1.1.2. High Speed Serial ATA Interface
Dual high speed serial ATA interface ports, each supporting 1st generation
Serial ATA data rates (1.5Gb/s).
Provides RAID 0 (Stripping) to greatly increase the performance of data
transfer by simultaneously writing data to 2 drives.
Provides RAID 1 (Mirroring) to protect the data from a disk failure by writing
identical data on 2 drives.