Features

Like previous nForce3 products, nForce4 continues NVIDIA’s single-chip architecture. Unlike more traditional chipset architectures, which consist of two chips – a North Bridge and a South Bridge – all the features found in nForce4 are contained within a single chip. Also like nForce3 Ultra, NVIDIA’s nForce4 chipset continues to support 1GHz HyperTransport (on the nForce4 Ultra and nForce4 SLI models, the vanilla nForce4 features an 800MHz HyperTransport interface) with 16-bit links for both upstream and downstream, ensuring peak efficiency. The first big addition to nForce4 comes to its storage subsystem.

Storage

If you recall earlier this year, NVIDIA announced that they would be adding support for Serial ATA 3Gigabytes/second technology in a future chipset that would be released in late 2004. Well folks, nForce4 is that chipset.

This figure is double that of today’s 1.5GB/sec Serial ATA hard disks, with the first drives shipping by the end of this year from hard drive manufacturers Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Western Digital, and Seagate. nForce4 continues to rely on a dual controller architecture with up to four Serial ATA drives supported, and will also support native command queuing for improved disk performance.

Converting RAID array

Selecting the RAID level

NVIDIA provides a couple of really cool storage features that no other chipset manufacturer supports. The most well known is arguably cross-controller RAID, which allows you to build a RAID array consisting of both Serial ATA and parallel ATA hard drives (all RAID levels are supported by the nForce4 chipset, including JBOD), the other is spare drive. With this feature you can install an additional hard drive that can be assigned as a spare; this spare drive can be used if a mirrored drive in your RAID 1 or RAID 0+1 array fails. If this occurs, the spare drive will kick in and automatically start rebuilding the array, replacing the drive that went down. The entire process is invisible to the user, all you have to do is designate the spare drive as a dedicated spare, which can serve as a standby for a particular RAID array, or as a shared spare, which can be used to protect multiple RAID arrays.

Step 2 select disks

Done!

One new feature NVIDIA has added is called Disk Alert. With some RAID arrays consisting of four drives, determining which hard drive failed can be a troublesome process. Disk Alert not only tells you when a drive fails, it literally shows you which Serial ATA connector the failed drive rests on. A picture of your motherboard will appear with the guilty culprit highlighted with a red box.

Red means bad green means good connector

Another feature NVIDIA has added to nForce4 is RAID morphing. With this feature, converting RAID arrays is much easier. Say for instance you want to convert your RAID 0 array into a RAID 0+1 array for added storage security. Normally you’d have to backup your data, delete the old RAID 0 array, reboot, create the new RAID 0+1 array, format the hard drives, and repopulate the new RAID 0+1 array with your old backed up data.

With RAID Morphing, this procedure is shrunk to one step. Simply run the Convert Array Wizard within NVIDIA’s NVRAID software suite and you’re done. Everything is automatically handled for you without having to manually format and reinstall everything.