Presentation and Bundle II
I bet the odd-looking implement in the picture caught your eye. From our look at the detailed specifications, we see that the IT7-MAX2 is equipped with 2 serial ATA interfaces, giving us 4 IDE RAID ports in total when we count the two standard 80-pin ports. Although the interfaces are present, there are no current hard drives that can use the S-ATA interface, we are still limited to the 80-pin standard. ABIT, in a vision of foresight, have bundled what they call the Serillel ATA-to-S-ATA converter, the name being an amalgamation of both standards.
The converter allows you to hook-up one of your IDE drives to the S-ATA port. The method is rather simple. You just attach the Serillel to your IDE hard drive, plug in the S-ATA cable on the other side, power both the Serillel and drive up using a provided adapter, and away you go.
The beauty of the S-ATA interface is its size. The above picture gives you an indication of just how small it is in comparison to a standard ATA133 cable. The other advantage is the hot-swappable nature of S-ATA. You can add or remove the cable without having to reboot the system. This applies to drives other than your boot drive, obviously.
Controlled by the HPT374 on-board RAID chip, you can use the S-ATA drive just like you would use a normal IDE RAID port. It functions in the same way, and preliminary testing showed that performance was largely the same. It's just a shame a second Serillel adapter wasn't included.
The speed of the interface can be set to the ones shown above, although we'll have to wait for hard drives to officially burst past the 133 MB/s rate before the 150 MBps standard is needed. It's all good from a future-proofing point of view, though.
No matter how hard I tried, and which hard drive I used, I simply could not get the S-ATA RAID ports to recognise the hard drive from within BIOS. The normal IDE RAID ports worked fine, but the S-ATA steadfastly refused to cooperate. This may be a user error on my part, so don't take this as the final word on the subject. I'm currently in discussion with ABIT to see whether the test sample is at fault, or if I'm missing something. Benchmarks from other S-ATA-equipped motherboards have shown it to perform identically to standard IDE.
The usual well-written manual and driver disc complete the bundle.
