HBA Specifications

The appendix contains the specifications for the HBA. This appendix contains the following topics:

• Physical Characteristics

• PCI Performance

• SAS Port Bandwidths

• HBA Card Layout

• Connectors

• Environmental Requirements

Physical Characteristics

The HBA board is a 6.6-in. x 2.713-in., low-profile board. The component height on the top and bottom of the board follows the PCI Express specifications.

PCI Performance

The PCI Express features of the HBA include the following:

• Provides 4 or 8 PCI Express PHYs

• Supports a single-PHY (one lane) link transfer rate up to 6.0 Gb/s in each direction

• Supports link widths of x8, x4, and x1

• Automatically downshifts to a x4-link width if plugged into a x8 connector that is wired as a x4 connector

• Provides a scalable interface:

  • Single-lane aggregate bandwidth of up to 0.5 GB/s (500 MB/s)

  • Quad-lane aggregate bandwidth of up to 2.0 GB/s (2000 MB/s)

  • Eight-lane aggregate bandwidth of up to 4.0 GB/s (4000 MB/s)

• Supports serial, point-to-point interconnections between devices:

  • Reduces the electrical load of the connection

  • Enables higher transmission and reception frequencies

• Supports lane reversal and polarity inversion

• Supports PCI Express hot plugging

• Supports power management

• Supports PCI Power Management 1.2:

  • Supports active-state power management (ASPM), including the L0, L0s, L1 states, by placing links in a power-savings mode when there is no link activity

  • Contains a replay buffer that preserves a copy of the data for retransmission in case a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error occurs

• Supports the PCI Express advanced error-reporting capabilities

• Uses a packetized and layered architecture

• Achieves high bandwidth per pin with low overhead and low latency

• Provides software compatibility with PCI and PCI-X software:

  • Leverages existing PCI device drivers

  • Supports the memory, I/O, and configuration address spaces

  • Supports memory read/write transactions, I/O read/write transactions, and configuration read/write transactions

• Provides 4 KB of PCI configuration address space per device

• Supports posted and nonposted transactions

• Provides quality-of-service (QOS) link configuration and arbitration policies

• Supports Traffic Class 0 and one virtual channel

• Supports message-signaled interrupts (both MSI and MSI-X) as well as INTx interrupt signaling for legacy PCI support

• Supports end-to-end CRC (ECRC) and advanced error reporting

SAS Port Bandwidths

The HBA supports narrow and wide ports, as described in the following table.

HBA Card Layout

HBA Card Layout shows the card layout of the HBA.

Figure A-1  HBA Card Layout

• J7: PCI Express x8-lane board edge connector

• J4, J5: SFF-8088 mini-SAS, external, right-angle connectors

• J3: 4-pin, right angle, 0.1-in. pitch, pin header for driving external activity LED

• TP2: UART connection

Connectors

The different HBA connectors are listed in the following table (See HBA Card Layout for connector locations.).

UART Connections lists the UART connections and their functions.

LED Header details the LED headers and their functions.

Environmental Requirements

The HBA environmental requirements are listed in HBA Environmental Requirements.