Product Brief
SiI 5723
SteelVine
™
Storage Processor
SATA to Dual eSATA Storage Processor
• DVR motherboards
• PC motherboards
• CE devices
Applications
The SteelVine SiI5723 storage processor is a low-cost, single chip solution designed to be
built into DVRs, PC motherboards and consumer electronics devices. It features a 3Gbps
SATA host interface and two eSATA capable device ports. The SiI5723 features Silicon
Image’s proprietary eSATA based capacity expansion, which allows users to grow the
capacity of an existing SteelVine enabled device by adding additional drives that appear to
the host system as additional space in the existing SteelVine volume.
The SteelVine SiI5723 storage processor extends
the capabilities of consumer electronics and DVR
devices as well as PC motherboards by adding
eSATA, capacity expansion, drive locking, single-
button backup support and other advanced stor-
age features on a single chip that easily integrates
with existing designs via a SATA connection.
Drive locking helps protect users’ data by allow-
ing them to password ‘lock’ directly attached and
cascaded drives. If a locked drive is detached from
its assigned computer or cascade, the data on the
drive will be inaccessible until it is reconnected
and unlocked with the user supplied password.
SiI5723 storage processors support JBOD and the
following RAID modes: FAST (
RAID 0
), SAFE
(
RAID 1
) and BIG (Concatenation) as well as two
new multi-RAID modes, SAFE33, and SAFE50.
Multi-RAID modes automatically create two vir-
tual volumes, one SAFE and the other BIG, and
are designed to balance the benefits of capacity
and protection with only two drives. SAFE50
divides the physical space on each drive equally to
create each virtual volume. In SAFE33, two-thirds
of the available physical space is used to create the
BIG partition, and the remaining one-third is used
for the SAFE partition.
When adding two drives to the SiI5723, BIG,
FAST, SAFE, SAFE33, SAFE50 and JBOD are sup-
ported. When drives are cascaded, BIG, SAFE,
SAFE33 and SAFE50 are available. RAID mode
configuration can be accomplished through a
GUI, strap pins, or I
2
C for true software-free
implementations.
Key Features
• eSATA capable
device ports
• eSATA capacity
expansion
• Drive locking
• Backup button
• RAID modes:
FAST (RAID 0),
SAFE (RAID 1),
SAFE33, SAFE50
BIG
(Concatenation)
SiI5723 System Diagram
SILICONIMAGE [ Silicon image ]
