DX5-ANT

The DX5-ANT is a XMC style mezzanine card, equipped with a quad-channel PCI Express® to SATA 6Gbps controller, and three on-board sockets for SATA based M.2 module solid state drives (SSD). M.2 (formerly known as NGFF) is a fast growing storage module form factor, with scalable dimensions, typically 22x42mm2 up to 22x80mm2 . The Marvell® SATA 3.0 on-board controller allows RAID or non RAID operation. A front bezel eSATA connector is provided for attachment of an external SATA storage device. The DX5-ANT connects up to four SATA III (6G) devices to a PCIe 2.0 host, delivering up to 1 Gigabyte-per-second (GBps) bandwidth when a two-lane 5.0 Gbps interface is available. In addition, hardware RAID level 0/1/10 operation is supported, enabled by an integrated ARM-based processor to offload the host CPU. With multiple M.2 SSD modules populated on the DX5-ANT, a fast and reliable Terabyte RAID or JBOD system can be configured, suitable e.g. for industrial mass storage applications.