NetCell TurboDisk NC5464
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The TD6405 is the basis for the TurboDisk architecture. Details are below.
It was decided that an Ultra ATA interface would be used for the start of NetCell's RAID XL family, since it still dominates the hard-drive market. In the future, however, serial ATA variations are easily conceivable. Available right away are the NC3232 with three ATA channels and the NC5464 with five channels that was provided to us. This unlikely number is a result of using a hard drive for parity data.
The small version is equipped with a 32 bit PCI interface that can operate with 33 or 66 MHz. The 5464, on the other hand, comes with a 64 bit PCI-interface and supports a maximum speed of 66 MHz, but can be started up in any PCI slot all the way up to PCI-X. Another difference lies in the cache memory they are equipped with: 128 MB in the five-channel version, 64 MB in the three-channel controller.
The core is the TD6405, a 64 bit IDE RAID controller that can process up to 800 MB/s. Up to 512 MB of cache memory can be used as support, but the test board is not far off from that. The XOR engine is worthy of mention - according to NetCell, all parity data can be generated in real time. This means that the 6405 should hardly draw at all on the capacity of the system processor.
