RAID storage controllers feature eight 6Gb/s SATA ports

Article By : Marvell

The Marvell 88RC13xx family touts high performance AHCI RAID on chip, a novel NVMe ROC, a DRAM-less input/output (I/O) processor with HW RAID 0, 1, 10 and a cost-effective I/O controller.

Marvell has rolled out a line-up of high-performance RAID storage controllers with a full set of features that include eight 6Gb/s SATA ports, four lanes of PCI Express 3.0, and a 10Gb/s USB 3.1 device port with Type-C connector support. According to the company, the Marvell 88RC13xx family features high performance AHCI RAID on chip (ROC), a novel NVMe ROC, a DRAM-less input/output (I/O) processor with HW RAID 0, 1, 10 and a cost-effective I/O controller.

The products target a number of markets such as cloud infrastructure, enterprise storage arrays, SATA host bus adapters (HBA), networked video surveillance, external directly attached USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt-3 storage (DAS), and entry-to-mid-range servers.

__Figure 1:__ *Marvell 88RC13xx PCIe 3.0 to 8-Port 6Gb/s SATA RAID storage controller*

The 88RC13xx product line integrates an efficient dual core Cortex-R5 CPU complex to off-load RAID functions from the host processor, while maximising storage performance and minimising latencies. Implementing AHCI and NVMe options for the host interface provides the alternative of maintaining legacy SW compatibility, while supporting a seamless migration path to NVMe storage connectivity to target superior performance. The integration of enclosure management functionalities and a generous number of general purpose I/O pins can dramatically reduce total system cost, while the ability to act as a boot device fully compatible with default OS drivers makes the 88RC13xx a highly versatile family of products, the company indicated.

The 88RC13xx controllers are also compatible with existing port multipliers, including Marvell’s 88SM97xx product series, a 6Gb/s SATA port multiplier.

The Marvell 88RC13xx product line includes: 88RC1348 AHCI ROC with USB 3.1, RAID 0,1,5,6,10, dual Cortex R5 processor; 88RC1368 NVMe ROC with USB 3.1, RAID 0,1,5,6,10, dual Cortex R5 processor; 88RC1328 I/O Processor with USB 3.1, RAID 0,1,10, dual Cortex R5 processor; and 88SE1337 I/O controller.

Key features of the Marvell 88RC13xx controllers include: eight 6Gb/s SATA ports, four lanes of PCIe 3.0, USB 3.1 port, dual Cortex-R5 600MHz on-chip processors, hardware RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, port multiplier support, support for up to 40 GPIO pins and SPI interface for external Option ROM (legacy or uEFI) bootable controller support.

The AHCI ROC is sampling to Marvell customers. The other products will be available in 2017.