Brand Name Technologies

Smart Backup

In the beginning of this article when we talked about the functionality of Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 mainboard, we mentioned 10 Serial ATA ports that it has. I believe we don’t have to tell you how many hard drives you can connect to it. The answer is evident: 10. And it is in fact correct, although we will only be able to use 8 of them. In order to explain why it happens like this we have to take a closer look at additional Silicon Image Sil5723 chips. They are not common RAID controllers that add extra Serial ATA ports, but multiplicators, splitters. They turn one of the existing SATA ports into two.

Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 mainboard is equipped with an additional Gigabyte SATA2 controller. Judging by its functionality, it seems to be a widely spread and very well familiar JMicron JMB363 chip that provides support for two Serial ATA ports and one Parallel ATA port. At the same time, two Silicon Image Sil5723 controllers turn two SATA ports into four. There is nothing bad about it. How fast does your HDD work with data? - 45MB/s, 60MB/s? Maybe 90MB/s? Even if it runs at 133MB/s there will be enough bandwidth for two HDDs like that and even some left.

Why did they need these Silicon Image Sil5723 chips in the first place? Why not install a couple of “real” SATA RAID controllers instead of them? There are several reasons for that. First, every additional controller takes on one PCI Express lane, which are never enough anyway, and here we just double the number of ports for free. By the way, the pricing may also matter in this case. Moreover, it is very easy to use HDDs connected to Silicon Image Sil5723 controller, because no drivers are required. Besides, these controllers have very interesting features. For example, they allow cascading the HDDs:

Hard drives connected to Silicon Image Sil5723 can work in BIG mode, i.e. be seen by the system as one large HDD. They can work in FAST mode, which is similar to RAID0, when all the info is written on and read from two HDDs simultaneously, which provides significant performance increase. However, if one of the hard drives fails, the data will be lost on both of them. This is when SAFE mode can help. It is similar to RAID1 (mirroring), i.e. the data is duplicated on two hard drives, so if one of them fails, you can always pull the data from another one. The speed is the same as in case of one hard drive, the reliability is pretty high, but you lose about half of the available storage capacity. The next two modes can help resolve this dilemma. SAFE33 allows allocating only one third of the hard drive capacity for mirroring purposes with the remaining space combined in BIG mode. SAFE50 is similar to SAFE33, with only half of the capacity allocated for mirroring.

Unfortunately, there is barely anything left from this remarkable functionality, since Smart Backup technology on Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 mainboard has Silicon Image Sil5723 working only in one single mode: SAFE. You have to connect the HDD to the first port of the two for each controller. Nothing terrible will happen if you connect the HDD to the second port, the system will simply not see it. If you connect both HDDs at the same time, the system will automatically copy the data from the first HDD to the second one. Be careful, as any data you might have had on the second HDD will be lost! This is the essence of Smart Backup technology: automatic data backup without any user involvement.

You can install Gigabyte Smart Backup utility that is completely analogous to SteelVine Manager from Silicon Image. It will allow monitoring the HDD performance, but you will not be able to change their configuration mode.

Smart Backup requires to reboot the board one more time during system startup. At first you will see “Initializing storage policy, please wait” message for 10 seconds. After that the board will reboot and you will see a new message saying “Wait Smart Backup Hard Drives ready” and only after that the standard POST procedure will kick in. Of course, Gigabyte Smart Backup technology does perform its function very well. It is a pity though that they had to give up the extensive functionality of Silicon Image Sil5723 controllers for the sake of this simplicity.