阅读说明：本技术 转换板卡和硬盘接口装置 (Conversion board card and hard disk interface device ) 是由 刘帅 于 2019-09-09 设计创作，主要内容包括：本发明公开了一种转换板卡和硬盘接口装置,该转换板卡包括SAS端口到SATA端口协议转换器、SAS端口以及SATA端口；SAS端口的一侧设置成与主板连接,SAS端口的另一侧设置成根据SAS2.0规范与协议转换器进行通信；SATA端口的一侧设置成与SATA硬盘连接,SATA端口的另一侧设置成根据SATA3.0规范与协议转换器进行通信；协议转换器用于采用SAS协议以及SATA协议对数据进行双向转换。转换板卡和硬盘接口装置提高了SATA硬盘的应用范围,增大了整个系统的存储容量,提高了整个系统的存储性能,并且相应地降低了单位存储空间的成本。(The invention discloses a conversion board card and a hard disk interface device, wherein the conversion board card comprises a protocol converter from an SAS port to an SATA port, an SAS port and the SATA port; one side of the SAS port is configured to be connected with the main board, and the other side of the SAS port is configured to communicate with the protocol converter according to the SAS2.0 specification; one side of the SATA port is arranged to be connected with the SATA hard disk, and the other side of the SATA port is arranged to communicate with the protocol converter according to the SATA3.0 specification; the protocol converter is used for performing bidirectional conversion on data by adopting an SAS protocol and an SATA protocol. The conversion board card and the hard disk interface device improve the application range of the SATA hard disk, increase the storage capacity of the whole system, improve the storage performance of the whole system and correspondingly reduce the cost of unit storage space.)

1. A conversion board card is characterized by comprising a protocol converter from an SAS port to an SATA port, an SAS port and the SATA port;

one side of the SAS port is configured to be connected to a motherboard, and the other side of the SAS port is configured to communicate with the protocol converter according to SAS2.0 specifications;

one side of the SATA port is arranged to be connected with a SATA hard disk, and the other side of the SATA port is arranged to communicate with the protocol converter according to the SATA3.0 specification;

the protocol converter is used for converting data input according to SAS2.0 specification into data output according to SATA3.0 specification and converting data input according to SATA3.0 specification into data output according to SAS2.0 specification by adopting firmware supporting SAS-to-SATA basic protocol conversion.

2. The conversion board of claim 1, wherein the motherboard in communication with the conversion board through a SAS port has a SAS protocol driver layer and no SATA protocol driver layer.

3. The conversion board of claim 1, further comprising a flash memory connected to the protocol converter via an SPI interface, wherein firmware of the protocol converter that supports SAS to SATA basic protocol conversion is stored in the flash memory.

4. The conversion board of claim 1, further comprising a UART interface connected to the protocol converter, as a debugging interface during program development and as a SAS address burning interface during production.

5. The conversion board of claim 1, further comprising a reset IC configured to monitor an input voltage of a protocol converter in real time to turn off the protocol converter when the input voltage falls below a low voltage threshold of an operating voltage of the protocol converter.

6. The conversion board of claim 1, further comprising a self-healing fuse configured to prevent over-voltage of a power supply voltage introduced from an on-board power interface in the SAS port and transient current surges of the power supply voltage to the conversion board when hot plugging the conversion board through the SAS port and the motherboard.

7. The conversion board of claim 1 or 6, further comprising a power tree including one or more buck converters to output adapted voltages from an output of the buck converter to the SATA port and the protocol converter.

8. The conversion board of claim 1, wherein the conversion board is secured to a hard disk support and is connected to a SATA hard disk supported by the hard disk support through the SATA port.

9. The conversion board of claim 1, wherein the SATA port of the conversion board is either a dual SATA port or a single SATA port.

10. A hard disk interface device, characterized in that the hard disk interface device comprises the conversion board card and a hard disk supporter of any one of claims 1 to 9; the hard disk support is used for supporting an SATA hard disk and fixing the conversion board card, and the conversion board card is connected with the SATA hard disk supported on the hard disk support through an SATA interface of the conversion board card.

Technical Field

The present invention relates to data conversion technology, and is especially one kind of conversion board card and hard disk interface device.

Background

With the application field of the storage industry becoming wider and wider, customers have not only required that storage devices have high reliability, but especially some small and medium-sized customers have pursued high cost performance of the storage devices, and the storage devices are expected to be low in price and capable of providing efficient storage performance to meet business requirements. One of the key components affecting the price of the storage device is a hard disk, and according to the communication protocol between the hard disk and the motherboard, the storage hard disks currently in mainstream are divided into two types, namely SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard disks for performing communication between the motherboard and the hard disk according to the SAS protocol and SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) hard disks for performing communication between the motherboard and the hard disk according to the SATA protocol, the price difference between the two types of hard disks can reach more than one time, the price of the SAS hard disks is higher than that of the SATA hard disks, however, the performance of the SAS hard disk is higher, in order to keep the price of the storage device low and enable the storage device to provide efficient storage performance, the SAS hard disk and the SATA hard disk are used simultaneously to achieve the purpose, the cost of unit storage space can be reduced by using the SATA hard disk, and high-efficiency storage performance can be provided for critical data by using the SAS hard disk. In order to achieve the above purpose, one storage device needs to be capable of communicating with the SAS hard disk by using the SAS protocol and also capable of communicating with the SATA hard disk by using the SATA protocol, so that one storage device needs to be compatible with the SAS protocol and the SATA protocol, a large amount of intensive research and development personnel need to perform adaptation development of underlying software for a motherboard by using the SAS protocol and the SATA protocol, a project cycle is long, and investment is high, thereby increasing cost of unit storage space.

Disclosure of Invention

In order to solve the above technical problems, the present invention provides a conversion board and a hard disk interface device, which can flexibly match a main board with an SAS port with an SATA hard disk, thereby reducing the cost of the entire storage system.

In order to achieve the object of the present invention, an embodiment of the present invention provides a conversion board, where the conversion board includes a protocol converter from an SAS port to an SATA port, an SAS port, and an SATA port;

one side of the SAS port is configured to be connected with the main board, and the other side of the SAS port is configured to communicate with the protocol converter according to the SAS2.0 specification;

one side of the SATA port is arranged to be connected with the SATA hard disk, and the other side of the SATA port is arranged to communicate with the protocol converter according to the SATA3.0 specification;

the protocol converter is used for converting data input according to SAS2.0 specification into data output according to SATA3.0 specification and converting data input according to SATA3.0 specification into data output according to SAS2.0 specification by adopting firmware supporting SAS-to-SATA basic protocol conversion.

In an alternative embodiment, the motherboard in communication with the conversion board through the SAS port has a SAS protocol driver layer and no SATA protocol driver layer.

In an optional embodiment, the conversion board further includes a flash memory connected to the protocol converter through the SPI interface, and firmware of the protocol converter supporting SAS-to-SATA basic protocol conversion is stored in the flash memory.

In an optional embodiment, the conversion board further includes a UART interface connected to the protocol converter, as a debugging interface during program development and as a SAS address burning interface during production.

In an optional embodiment, the conversion board further comprises a reset IC configured to monitor an input voltage of the protocol converter in real time to turn off the protocol converter when the input voltage falls below a low voltage threshold of an operating voltage of the protocol converter.

In an optional embodiment, the conversion board further comprises a self-healing fuse arranged to prevent over-voltage of a power supply voltage introduced from an on-board power interface in the SAS port and transient current surges of the power supply voltage to the conversion board when the conversion board is hot-plugged with the motherboard through the SAS port.

In an optional embodiment, the conversion board further comprises a power tree comprising one or more buck converters to output adapted voltages from the output of the buck converters to the SATA ports and the protocol converter.

In an alternative embodiment, the conversion board is fixed to the hard disk support and is connected to a SATA hard disk supported by the hard disk support through a SATA port.

In an alternative embodiment, the SATA port of the conversion board is a dual SATA port or a single SATA port.

In order to achieve the above object, an embodiment of the present invention provides a hard disk interface device, which includes the conversion board card and the hard disk supporter in the above embodiments; the hard disk support is used for supporting the SATA hard disk and fixing the conversion board card, and the conversion board card is connected with the SATA hard disk supported on the hard disk support through the SATA interface of the conversion board card.

The embodiment of the invention has the advantages that the application range of the SATA hard disk is enlarged by the conversion board card, the storage capacity of the whole system is increased, the storage performance of the whole system is improved, and the cost of unit storage space is correspondingly reduced.

Additional features and advantages of the invention will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be obvious from the description, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objectives and other advantages of the invention will be realized and attained by the structure particularly pointed out in the written description and claims hereof as well as the appended drawings.

Drawings

The accompanying drawings are included to provide a further understanding of the invention and are incorporated in and constitute a part of this specification, illustrate embodiments of the invention and together with the example serve to explain the principles of the invention and not to limit the invention.

FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a SATA hard disk, a host, an SAS hard disk and a converter card provided by an embodiment of the present invention connected in use;

fig. 2 is a schematic structural diagram of a conversion board card provided in the embodiment of the present invention;

fig. 3 is a schematic structural diagram of a hard disk interface device according to an embodiment of the present invention.

Detailed Description

In order to make the objects, technical solutions and advantages of the present invention more apparent, embodiments of the present invention will be described in detail below with reference to the accompanying drawings. It should be noted that the embodiments and features of the embodiments in the present application may be arbitrarily combined with each other without conflict.

The steps illustrated in the flow charts of the figures may be performed in a computer system such as a set of computer-executable instructions. Also, while a logical order is shown in the flow diagrams, in some cases, the steps shown or described may be performed in an order different than here.

With the application field of the storage industry becoming wider and wider, customers have not only required that storage devices have high reliability, but especially some small and medium-sized customers have pursued high cost performance of the storage devices, and the storage devices are expected to be low in price and capable of providing efficient storage performance to meet business requirements. One of the key components affecting the price of the storage device is a hard disk, and according to the communication protocol between the hard disk and the motherboard, the storage hard disks currently in mainstream are divided into two types, namely SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard disks for performing communication between the motherboard and the hard disk according to the SAS protocol and SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) hard disks for performing communication between the motherboard and the hard disk according to the SATA protocol, the price difference between the two types of hard disks can reach more than one time, the price of the SAS hard disks is higher than that of the SATA hard disks, however, the performance of the SAS hard disk is higher, in order to keep the price of the storage device low and enable the storage device to provide efficient storage performance, the SAS hard disk and the SATA hard disk are used simultaneously to achieve the purpose, the cost of unit storage space can be reduced by using the SATA hard disk, and high-efficiency storage performance can be provided for critical data by using the SAS hard disk. In order to achieve the above purpose, one storage device needs to be capable of communicating with the SAS hard disk by using the SAS protocol and also capable of communicating with the SATA hard disk by using the SATA protocol, so that one storage device needs to be compatible with the SAS protocol and the SATA protocol, a large amount of intensive research and development personnel need to perform adaptation development of underlying software for a motherboard by using the SAS protocol and the SATA protocol, a project cycle is long, and investment is high, thereby increasing cost of unit storage space.

In order to solve the above technical problem, an embodiment of the present invention provides a conversion board, as shown in fig. 1 to fig. 3, the conversion board 100 includes an SAS port to SATA port protocol converter 110, an SAS port 120, and a SATA port 130.

One side of the SAS port 120 is configured to be connected to the motherboard 200, and the other side of the SAS port is configured to communicate with the protocol converter 110 according to the SAS2.0 specification.

One side of the SATA port 130 is arranged to connect with the SATA hard disk 300, and the other side of the SATA port 130 is arranged to communicate with the protocol converter 110 according to the SATA3.0 specification.

Protocol converter 110 is used to convert data input according to the SAS2.0 specification to data output according to the SATA3.0 specification and to convert data input according to the SATA3.0 specification to data output according to the SAS2.0 specification using firmware that supports SAS to SATA basic protocol conversion. The communication of the conversion board with the motherboard 200 may be bidirectional, and the communication of the conversion board with the SATA hard disk 300 may be bidirectional. When the conversion board 100 receives data from the motherboard 200, the protocol converter 110 converts the data received from the motherboard 200 through the SAS port 120 into data compliant with the SATA3.0 specification according to the SAS2.0 specification, and outputs the data to the SATA hard disk 300 through the SATA port 130. When the conversion board 100 receives data from the SATA hard disk 300, the protocol converter 110 converts the data received from the SATA hard disk 300 through the SATA port 130 into data compliant with the SAS2.0 specification according to the SATA3.0 specification, and outputs the data to the motherboard 100 through the SAS port 120. By connecting the SAS port 120 and the SATA port 130 of the conversion board to the motherboard 200 and the SATA hard disk 300, respectively, the motherboard 200 can communicate with the SATA hard disk 300 through the SAS port thereof. Meanwhile, the main board 200 can directly communicate with the SAS hard disk through the SAS port, and therefore, the main board 200 can exchange data with the SATA hard disk by only requiring the main board 200 to have an SAS protocol driver layer and an SAS port in conjunction with the conversion board 100 provided by the embodiment of the present invention, so that development difficulty and cost for developing the main board 200 are reduced, and further, cost for unit storage space is reduced. In addition, the SATA hard disk of a specific model or function may not be limited by the conversion board 100 to be collocated with the motherboard, so that the SATA hard disk 300 may be more flexibly compatible with the motherboard 200, and even when the motherboard 200 has only an SAS protocol driver layer, the SATA hard disk 300 may also communicate with the motherboard 200. Therefore, the conversion board card provided by the embodiment of the invention improves the application range of the SATA hard disk, increases the storage capacity of the whole system, improves the storage performance of the whole system and correspondingly reduces the cost of unit storage space.

In addition, as shown in fig. 1, the motherboard 200 may communicate with the conversion board 100 and the SAS hard disk through the backplane to which the ports are connected.

In an alternative embodiment, the motherboard 200 connected to the conversion board 100 has a SAS protocol driver layer and does not have a SATA protocol driver layer. Under this condition, compared with a motherboard having both an SAS protocol driver layer and an SATA protocol driver layer, the difficulty and cost of developing the motherboard 200 are reduced, thereby reducing the cost of the entire system.

In an optional embodiment, the conversion board 100 further includes a flash memory (flash memory)140 connected to the protocol converter 110 through the SPI interface, and firmware of the protocol converter supporting SAS-to-SATA basic protocol conversion is stored in the flash memory 140. The flash memory is a non-volatile memory, and has the advantage of fast access speed, and therefore, is suitable for storing the firmware of the protocol converter 110 for a long time, and the firmware can support the protocol converter 110 to convert data between the SAS-compliant protocol and the SATA-compliant protocol.

In an alternative embodiment, the conversion board 100 further includes a UART interface 150 connected to the protocol converter, wherein the UART interface 150 is used as a debug (debug) interface when a developer develops a program for the protocol converter 110 and when the developer injects the program, and is used as a SAS address burning interface when the developer is producing the SAS.

In an optional embodiment, the conversion board 100 further includes a reset IC160, and the reset IC160 is configured to monitor the input voltage of the protocol converter 110 in real time to turn off the protocol converter when the input voltage drops below a low voltage threshold (typically 2.3V) of the operating voltage of the protocol converter 110; this can prevent the abnormal function of the protocol converter 110, the abnormal firmware, and the error code during the protocol conversion process caused by the abnormal power supply.

In an alternative embodiment, the conversion board 100 further includes a self-healing fuse (eFuse)170, the self-healing fuse 170 being configured to prevent over-voltage of a power supply voltage introduced from an onboard power interface in the SAS port 120, and the self-healing fuse 170 further preventing damage to the conversion board 100 from transient current surges of the power supply voltage to the conversion board 100 when the conversion board 100 is hot plugged through the SAS port 120 to the motherboard 200.

In an optional embodiment, the conversion board 100 further includes a power tree 180, the power tree 180 includes one or more buck converters 185, and the power tree 180 is connected to a power voltage, which may be from the SAS port 120; when the conversion board 100 includes the self-healing fuse 170, the power tree 180 accesses the power voltage through the self-healing fuse 170; by the time when the plurality of buck converters 185 are included in the power tree 180, the plurality of buck converters 185 in series can buck the power voltage multiple times until an adapted voltage is output from the output of the buck converter 185 to the SATA port 130 and the protocol converter 110. The adapted voltages output to the SATA port 130 are 5V and 12V. The adapted voltages output to the protocol converter 110 are 2.5V and 1V. A voltage of 2.5V and a voltage of 1V may be used as power supply voltages for different parts of the protocol converter 110. By outputting voltages of 5V and 12V to the SATA port 130, it is possible to output a working voltage to the SATA hard disk connected to the conversion board 100 through the SATA port 130, so as to drive the SATA hard disk to operate, where the voltage of 12V is used to drive a motor in the SATA hard disk to operate, and the voltage of 5V is used for an integrated circuit in the SATA hard disk and operations of various chips therein.

In an alternative embodiment, the conversion board 100 is fixed to the hard disk supporter 400 and connected to the SATA hard disk 300 supported by the hard disk supporter 400 through the SATA port 130. The hard disk holder 400 is fixedly connected to the conversion board 100, and the SATA hard disk 300 may be supported by the hard disk holder 400 when in use, so that the SATA hard disk 300 communicates with the conversion board 100 through the SATA port 130.

In an alternative embodiment, SATA port 130 of translation board 100 is either a dual SATA port or a single SATA port; when SATA port 130 is a dual SATA port, protocol converter 110 may be a protocol converter manufactured by the american technology Group Ltd (model 88SF 9210), and may communicate with two SATA hard disks through SATA port 130, where a transmission rate of a SATA transmission line between protocol converter 110 and each SATA port 130 is 6 Gb/s; when SATA port 130 is a single SATA port, protocol translator 110 can be a type 88SF9110 protocol translator available from the US technical group.

In order to solve the above technical problem, an embodiment of the present invention further provides a hard disk interface device 500, as shown in fig. 3, the hard disk interface device 500 includes the conversion board 100 and the hard disk supporter 400 provided in any one of the above embodiments of the present invention; the hard disk supporter 400 is used to support a SATA hard disk and fix the conversion board 100, and the conversion board 100 is connected to the SATA hard disk supported by the hard disk supporter 400 through its SATA interface.

Although the embodiments of the present invention have been described above, the above description is only for the convenience of understanding the present invention, and is not intended to limit the present invention. It will be understood by those skilled in the art that various changes in form and details may be made therein without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention as defined by the appended claims.