Manual
KT965 Family
KTD-00699-S Public User Manual Date: 2010-04-15 Page 36 of 90
4.6 Serial ATA harddisk interface
The KT965 boards have an integrated SATA Host controller that supports independent DMA operation on
six ports and data transfer rates of up to 3.0Gb/s (300MB/s). The SATA controller supports AHCI mode and
has integrated RAID functionality with support for RAID modes 0, 1, 5 and 10 (Linux O/S only support for
RAID 0 and 1).
The board provides six Serial ATA (SATA) connectors, which support one device per connector.
The ICH8DO’s Serial ATA controller offers six independent Serial ATA ports with a theoretical maximum
transfer rate of 3 Gbits/sec per port. One device can be installed on each port for a maximum of six Serial
ATA devices. A point-to-point interface is used for host to device connections, unlike Parallel ATA IDE which
supports a master/slave configuration and two devices per channel.
For compatibility, the underlying Serial ATA functionality is transparent to the operating system. The Serial
ATA controller can operate in both legacy and native modes. In legacy mode, standard IDE I/O and IRQ
resources are assigned (IRQ 14 and 15). In Native mode, standard PCI Conventional bus resource steering
is used. Native mode is the preferred mode for configurations using the Windows XP and Windows 2000
operating systems.
The KT965 supports the following RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives) levels:
• RAID 0 - data striping
• RAID 1 - data mirroring
• RAID 0+1 (or RAID 10) - data striping and mirroring
• RAID 5 - distributed parity
Limitations depending on Target Operating System apply.
4.6.1 SATA Hard Disk Connector (SATA0, SATA1, SATA2, SATA3, SATA4, SATA5)
SATA:
PIN
Signal
Type
Ioh/Iol
Pull
U/D
Note
Key
1 GND PWR - -
2 SATA* TX+
3 SATA* TX-
4 GND PWR - -
5 SATA* RX-
6 SATA* RX+
7 GND PWR - -
The signals used for the primary Serial ATA harddisk interface are the following:
Signal Description
SATA* RX+
SATA* RX-
Host transmitter differential signal pair
SATA* TX+
SATA* TX-
Host receiver differential signal pair
“*” specifies 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 depending on SATA port.
All of the above signals are compliant to [4].