The increased adoption of the fast
Serial ATA (SATA) and Serial
Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces
has brought about a need for improved
and faster testing. Catalyst Enterprises'
portable STX-131 is ideal for field
engineers and service technicians who
need to test and troubleshoot these
interfaces on the go.
The STX-131 interfaces with laptops
and PCs via a standard USB port (see
the figure). Cables connect it to the SAS
or SATA bus for data capture and analysis.
It supports data speeds of 1.5 and
3.0 Gbits/s and captures and decodes
the data traffic for immediate analysis,
display, and problem identification.
The unit has auto-speed detection and
a 512-Mbyte trace buffer memory. It captures
data from a single bi-directional
port. Protocol errors are automatically
detected and clearly displayed. The STX-
131 also can maximize the use of the
trace memory by filtering traffic that may
not be of interest, such as IDLEs,
SATA_cont or SATA_Sync primitives, and
"XXXX" filler.
The STX-131 includes a manual triggering
ability with an on-screen start/stop
button. Users can accomplish triggering
with an external event or by using the
"snapshot" mode, which recodes until a
predefined buffer size is reached. The system
lets users define a trigger position at
the beginning, end, or any position with
the captured data trace. This lets users
capture traffic before and/or after specific
problem events so the problem may be
more quickly identified in context.
Also, the STX-131 can produce a wide
range of statistical reports and data
views to help analyze complex bus traffic
patterns. Some of the statistical reports
include performance statistics, primitive
statistics, SAS address statistics, and
SCSI command statistics.
The basic model of the STX-131 costs
$9950, with availability in two weeks.
See associated figure
Catalyst Enterprises
www.getcatalyst.com
