External Serial ATA Support

The red Serial ATA connectors on the back panel can be used for an external SATA drive. They can also be used for port replication, which allows the aggregation of multiple hard drives on each of the eSATA ports. Figure 2 on page 9 shows the location of the External Serial ATA-compatible SATA ports on the back panel.
The Marvell 88SE621 controller uses the PCI Express for data transfer with a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 3 Gbits/sec per port. These connectors are in addition to the six SATA connectors of the ICH9R SATA interface.

The discrete SATA interface supports the following RAID levels:

• RAID 0
• RAID 1