MediaShield Technology

The new nForce 500 family has up to six native SATA II connectors which can be used for connecting six single drives to make one large RAID 5 array or a number of smaller arrays.

Because these six connections are native, each one of them has the entire 3Gb/s bandwith available. While this is not of great concern with single drive configurations, it becomes one with large arrays. The price of SATA II hard drives has been dropping while the capacities have been going up. Having six native connections may just be what the enthusiast gamer or professional needs. It is still much cheaper to buy three 200GB or even 300GB drives than one 750GB drive.


Previously, SATA connections were added by mainboard manufactures through a seperate chip on the mainboard. The nForce 4 had four native connections and two or four external connections through a Silicon Image or Promise chip. These solutions usually used a PCIe x1 lane to connect to the core-logic, creating a bottleneck. It has proven that such an external controller does not offer the best performance when a RAID array is used.


There is no need for an external controller, because the nForce 500 series has up to six native connections. Manufacturers may include one to raise the number of SATA connections from 6 to 8 or even 10. NVIDIA nForce 4 boards from some manufacturers like ASUS and DFI already have eight connections with the use of an external connector.