USB-ATA bridge / external harddrive enclosure/ CS88188

I would like to make use of an external harddrive enclosure (no drive) which has a USB connector on the outside and an IDE/ATA connector on the inside of the case. The project will just use the data lines and possibly address for chip selection.

Does anyone have information or URL for a CS88188? That is what the controller chip on the bridge is marked.

Does the bridge act like a high speed, but blind, serial-parallel converter, or does it look at the command set being passed over it? I only want to do PIO if that matters.

Thanks for any assistance Rob (robert.mitchell4@sympatico)

Reply to
basement_guy
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There are a set of protocols that disk drives follow and on top of that there are specific protocols used to encode drive commands and information over a USB link. Most drives follow a variation of the SCSI command set for drive commands, such as read, write, seek, etc. On top of this, the USB uses the mass storage class specification and typically the bulk transfer protocol, which specify how the disk drive commands get wrapped into packets of information suitable for transfer over the USB link. Consequently, the transfers are not performed in a PIO fashion.

In addition to all this, I am assuming you are using Windows here, the OS will enumerate the USB controller and determine its operating characteristics. It will see the device and vendor IDs and try to associate a driver with these. More than likely, it will think that the device is a disk drive and try to use it as such. You would need to write your own driver and somehow replace the standard driver with this. I firmly believe that windows was written with the idea that the people using it are complete and total idiots and that MS is second only to god. Good luck with getting it to accept your driver instead.

It would probably be significantly easier in the long run to investigate the many USB device controller chips and kits available today and use those as a USB to PIO bridge.

Reply to
Noway2

I think that is all ok. A driver would wrap the SCSI command data, and it would be 'unwrapped' by the USB stack on the bridge, and the raw SCSI commands put on the IDE bus. Is that correct? But does the USB code ever examine the SCSI commands, or is that just a data payload?

No, Linux, and hopefully Palm. I would hack an existing Linux USB disk driver, and create a device appropriately.

Thanks, I'll look into it.

However, I'm still looking for a reference to that particular chip. Any clues?

Reply to
basement_guy

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