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Thank you to our sponsorÌýHGST, a Western Digital company!

HGST, a Western Digital company, is currently creating a baseboard called Mt. Madonna that will control many hard drives. Today HGST does not have an I/O module with the correct inputs and outputs to control, power, and test the Mt. Madonna baseboard and the hard drives connected. For HGST to test the functionality and verify the Mt. Madonna baseboard is working correctly, an I/O module must be able to transfer data from the servers to the hard drives, power the hard drives, and provide communication from an external Marvell microcontroller to the Mt. Madonna baseboard.

Mt Jasper has inputs and outputs for the server data, any type of microcontroller with an I2C bus, a personal computer, and power to the Mt. Madonna baseboard while simultaneously provides power to the hard drives.

The HGST Test Engineers tasked with ensuring the functionality of the Mt. Madonna baseboard will benefit greatly from having the I/O test module, Mt. Jasper.Ìý The Mt. Jasper board will allow for any bugs in the Mt. Madonna baseboard to be noticed and allow the HGST Test Engineers to fix the bugs. HGST will also test an external microcontroller with the Mt. Jasper board to verify the external microcontroller is functioning correctly. After Mt. Madonna baseboard and the external microcontroller are functioning perfectly, then HGST will create a more complex I/O module that will replace Mt. Jasper.

Mt. Jasper provides specific capabilities to properly tests the Mt. Madonna baseboard. These capabilities include a high-speed Serial Attached SCSI data communication from the servers to the hard drive connected to the Mt. Madonna baseboard without any loss of data. Mt. Jasper will also power and pass through 54 Amps to the hard drives that are connected to the Mt. Madonna baseboard. Two external devices will be able to have communication with Mt. Jasper and pass or read data to and from Mt. Madonna baseboard. A personal computer has an easy-to-use command line interface to verify the Mt. Jasper board is functioning correctly and to turn on fans to keep the board at a cool temperature.