Alternative terms for master and slave

Odd. All my SATA cables have _two_ ends, and there's a device at each end. I was under the distinct impression that at one end is the master and at the other end there's a slave.

There are are tons of other point-point protocols that use the master/slave nomenclature, even if SATA doesn't.

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Grant
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Grant Edwards
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Hah, you may call them that of course, some people may even be calling them that.

But for people familiar with ATA and subsequently SATA and in the context above "master" and "slave" refer to device 0 and device 1 on the ATA cable, you probably remember your parallel ATA (aka IDE) cables having 3 connectors: one for the host, one for device 0 (which some called "master") and one for device 1 (which some called "slave"). Actually I don't know where that master/slave came from, perhaps from the times ATA was called IDE which was before I used any ATA drives in our products (used SCSI back then, until they stopped at 810MB or so for 2.5" drives).

Dimiter

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Dimiter_Popoff

Am 20.12.2020 um 22:23 schrieb Dimiter_Popoff:

Not really. Parallel ATA learnd this ("cable select") as an option long after the master/slave roles had been assigned.

The primary choice was made by jumpers on the devices, with three options: master, slave, or cable-select. Only if both devices were jumpered CS would their position on the cable have any significance.

The master/slave terminology was attached because device 1 was unable to work on its own. I.e. a single device would always have to be device 0.

Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Bröker

Not so. Clearly you have never designed in ATA drives.

The "cable select" signal is just a pin connected to the host and to one of the two devices, thus enabling them to know which of the two is device 0 and which is device 1 (lookup d1153r18, it is explained well enough there). The jumpers on the devices are to override the cable select connection and are unnecessary on correctly designed hosts/devices.

And of course you can have a single device on an ATA cable which is device 1, although it is rarely done and typically unnecessary.

Dimiter

====================================================== Dimiter Popoff, TGI

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Dimiter_Popoff

Am 21.12.2020 um 16:29 schrieb Dimiter_Popoff:

The level of your arrogance never disappoints.

Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Bröker

Sorry, did not mean to be arrogant. I can see it can be interpreted like this though, I must have been thinking on all the history I have had with ATA drives, CPLD interfaces and drivers I have been doing for them. Not very interesting or complex to do but quite bulky. Sorry again if I offended you.

Dimiter

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Dimiter_Popoff

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