Acard ARS-2160 User Manual - The Overview
Chapter 1 About SCSIDE II
The Overview
ACARD is an expert of storage. It has years of experiences in the design, development and
application of storage devices. The quick solutions it provides always meet the market demand,
and have won praise from some well-known manufacturers in the world. Over the years its
exclusive SCSIDE technology, chips and system applications have obtained an important market
share, but now owing to the change of times, its SCSIDE technology is no longer simply used to
make SCSI-to-IDE (SATA) Bridges that turn ATA/IDE (SATA) hard drives or ATAPI devices into
high-performance SCSI ones. The technology can be furthermore used to design serialized,
visualized and fit-for-network Bridges to connect more storage devices and to do more
transformations like SATA-to-SAS, Network-to-SATA/SAS, etc. For these different applications,
ACARD has given the technology a new name SCSIDE II. That means the second generation of
SCSIDE technology. Storage products based on SCSIDE II are more practical and more popular.
Besides having the new functions of ACARD’s IC, the series products of SCSIDE II contain the
technology of the first generation, too. In operation, SCSIDE II uses the built-in RISC on the chip
for interface transformation to lower the burden of CPU in data transfer, and accordingly enhances
the I/O performance, makes the whole system more stable and more efficient. The applications of
SCSIDE II on different storage devices are flexible and steady. The prices of SCSIDE II products
are also reasonable.
The reason of turning an IDE/SATA/SAS interface into a high-end, all-purpose
SATA/SCSI/Network one is that corporations have desired to get highly efficient and stable
interfaces for data transfer by using inexpensive storage interfaces so as to accomplish the
economy of costs. Obviously, SCSIDE II has the technological advantage and its price meets the
corporate budget. ACARD’s series products of SCSIDE II are quite compatible with Windows
NT/2000/XP/Vista, Linux, Unix and Mac.
SCSI-to-SATA
The basic type of SCSIDE II is raising a SATA interface from 15.G to 3G. The SCSI interface is
raised to Ultra 320 too. Besides being applied to SATA devices for transformation, SCSIDE II also
supports the newest SATAPI devices for the transformation of SATA to SCSI. Furthermore, the
form factors of SCSIDE II products include the industrial standards, too. In other words, such
modularized products are specially designed for industrial storage equipment.
ARS-2160/ARS-2320 Manual
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