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A Closer Look
Rocket 1511
The Rocket 1511 is a single channel
Serial-ATA host adaptor card designed quite simply
to either add Serial-ATA to ssytems that don't allready
feature it or to add an additional channel to those
that do.
In the brightly coloured and if rather
matter-of-fact box comes the bare essentials you need
to get moving....what?...you weren't expecting some
free games were you? I should mention that the floppy
with all the drivers on couldn't be read when it came
time for me to use it and I couldn't for the life
of me find them on HighPoint's website. A quick email
to tech support and the problem was dealt with quickly
and courteously but why aren't they on the site? And
if they are, why are they so hard for a mere mortal
like me to find?
Then of course there's the card itself,
a very compact PCI affair with little more than an
EPROM (BIOS chip) and the HPT302 controller soldered
on..
Serial ATA to UltraATA bridging is handled
using the Marvell 88i8030 chip. The 88i8030 is actually
a programmable transceiver and is scalable to 3.0
Gbps to support the future Generation II, Phase II,
SATA speed, theoretically at least. It also and implements
Spread Spectrum Clocking for reduced EMI.
Meanwhile the HPT302 IDE controller
chip takes care of the P-ATA side of things. The HPT302
is a simple, inexpensive, single channel UDMA ATA133
Controller.
Below are two pictures of the connector/s
on the Rocket 1511's bracket. The top one is how it
actually is while the bottom one is a figment of my
imagination courtesy of Photoshop that shows how I
wish it looked......let me explain.
As it is
As it Should Be?
When I cracked open the box that contained
the actual hard drive enclosure (The Rocket100) which
we'll get to on the next page, it was clear that the
version I'd been sent had the wrong pins on the transformer
for UK sockets. After confirmimg that the output was
indeed 12v DC and that no voltage modification was
happening inside the enclosure itself, I lopped off
the transformer and using a little heat shrink I grafted
on a regular 4 pin Molex. This worked fine other than
me needing to remove an expansion slot blank so as
to be able to feed the cable in and out, at which
point I kept thinking how handy it would have been
if it had come equipped with an externally accessible
Molex, ideally with a pass-thru inside, and a cable
to suit.
e.SATA B11
For those lucky enough to have a motherboard
that already comes with its own internal SATA connectors,
you can, should you wish use the bracket e.SATA B11
whichis nothing more than an adaptor. It connects
to your motherboard's SATA connector and you then
mount it in a free expansion slot. Like with the 1511
above I really would like to see it come with an external
4 pin Molex.
Not a whole lot in the box to get excited
about as you might expect with just the adaptor bracket
and a brief user manual.
Hold on a minute! Isn't that a regular
4 pin IEEE1394 Firewire socket? Well, it certainly
looks like it to me. So the whole e.SATA idea is to
send Serial-ATA data along a regular Firewire cable?
Looks like it!
I'm not complaining though. So long
as the performance is there they can send it along
a boot lace for all I care, and at least this way
it should be easy to get hold of a replacememnt cable
if you damage yours, or even get hold of a longer
one should you need it.
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