Design and Implementation of RAID Controller using Serial ATA Interface

Serial ATA Interface를 통한 RAID Controller 보드의 설계 및 구현

In this paper, we have designed and implemented the RAID controller board which connects to the host computer with serial ATA interface and connects to the disks with parallel ATA interface. Serial ATA interface is proposed to overcome the design limitation of parallel ATA while enabling the storage interface to scale with the slowing media rate demands for PC platforms. Serial ATA is to replace parallel ATA with the compatibility with existing operating systems and drivers, adding performance headroom for years to come. It Moreover, serial ATA provides even faster transfer rate of 150 Mbytes/s which is larger than that of current parallel ATA. The RAID controller board designed in this paper combines up to 4 disks with parallel ATA interface, and connects to PC host computer with serial ATA interface. We have implemented RAID controller using Verilog HDL language with FPGA chip. The RAID controller supports RAID level 0 and 1 functionality. Experimently, the average read/write performance of parallel ATA interface is about 30 Mbytes/s. Therefore, when 4 parallel disks is connected to the RAID controller board, we can get almost full throughput of serial ATA protocol using the RAID level 0 configuration with 4 disks.