PCI Express mini card has dual eSATA ports

With the ever increasing availability of PCI Express mini card slots on modern motherboards, the modules have been designed to provide a means of adding external storage capability to compact systems. Each eSATA port has a bandwidth of 3Gbits/s and the MPX-3132, based on the Sil3132 SteelVine controller, uses frame information structure (FIS) based switching with a balancing algorithm to ensure a fair allocation of available bandwidth to each drive, aggregating the throughput to the single lane PCIE host. The unit also supports Port Multipliers. Available with drivers for Windows and Linux drivers, the card supports RAID 0 (FAST), 1 (SAFE) and BIG drive spanning across two independent drives and RAID 0, 1, 10 (SAFE and FAST) and, when attached to a Port Multiplier, RAID 5, which gives particularly low cost redundancy. The MPX-3132 is the latest in a range of Mini-PCI Express mini cards with functions including Video capture and compression, USB, and serial data ports.