MegaRAID™ 9520-2M2 PCIe

Gen 4.0 Boot Storage Adapter

12Gb/s NVMe and SATA RAID Boot Adapter

Overview

The MegaRAID™ 9520-2M2 adapter provides a reliable boot solution based on the Broadcom® second-generation PCIe Gen 4.0 Tri-Mode SAS3808 I/O controller. The 9520-2M2 adapter supports two M.2 NVMe or SATA drives, enabling users to separate their OS drives from their primary data drives. By taking advantage of the unified Broadcom tool suite, users familiar with the Broadcom standard RAID and HBA controllers can easily integrate the 9520-2M2 adapter into their existing management application suite.

The 9520-2M2 adapter is a low-profile, half-length adapter that fits into a standard PCIe slot with two onboard M.2 drives. Customers who trust

hardware RAID for critical data can expand this trust to their OS drives. There is no need to sacrifice two drive bays that can be used for user data. The 9520-2M2 adapter enables RAID 0 and RAID 1 using the trusted Broadcom MegaRAID stack.

Leveraging the MegaRAID iMR entry RAID firmware, the 9520-2M2 supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 without requiring the Reserved Memory Region Reporting (RMRR) structure. This means that upon startup, the 9520-2M2 does not claim host memory for the RAID functions and other background operations. Due to security concerns, platform limitations on using RMRR are always increasing, so the 9520-2M2 instead uses the SAS3808 on-chip memory to carry out the RAID and other necessary operations. This also allows for easy integration into system architectures that do not have a memory reservation capability to support a traditional iMR solution, such as the 9520-2M2.

Tri-Mode SerDes Technology

The 9520-2M2 adapter takes advantage of the Broadcom Tri-Mode SerDes technology, enabling the most flexibility for customers by supporting NVMe or SATA M.2 drives for OS boot applications. The adapter detects the drive type and negotiates between speeds and protocols to automatically recognize and work with either NVMe or SATA M.2 drives.

Hardware Secure Boot

The onboard controller incorporates advanced security through hardware secure boot. The hardware secure boot feature permits only authenticated firmware to execute on the adapter. The internal Boot ROM on the controller establishes an initial Root of Trust (RoT). Hardware secure boot authenticates and builds a Chain of Trust (CoT) with succeeding firmware images using the RoT. This CoT means that only authorized firmware is executed on the adapter. Broadcom provides the signed firmware images, which make the use of hardware secure boot transparent to customers and also provide confidence in the security of the solution.