SATA / SATA II for embedded system ?

Question

Hello,is it possible to use SATA / SATA II for embedded systems ? At the moment i have almost no info about SATA, so please forgive my general questions.The SATA connector looks fairly simple (reference see below), only 4 data lines needed plus 3 ground pins.Is it needed to use the high speed of 1,5 GBit/s or 3,0 GBit/s or can i use the much slower (in kHz area, which a uC can generate, e.g. by bit banging) ?Or are there easy to use controller, which can be connected to a uC (like SPI, or an 8 + x bit interface) of an embedded system and SATA HD on the other side ?Remark: No project behind at the moment. I want to use the SATA only because of simple wiring (instead of P-ATA) and big space on HD.Is it worth buying the specification (ok, looks to be cheap compared to other spec...), or do i immediately see, that i can forget my project, because it is not possible ?Is  the official page for SATA / SATA II specifications, or are there different ones ?I at least found the pinout onThe spec can be bought for less money (25 USD) atRegards,        Martin

Jim Stewart · Accepted Answer

Looking at this document, page 4...It looks unlikely.  Much talk of packet framing,CRC, 8b/10b encoding, etc.  Since there's noseparate clock line, I'd imagine that the timingis tightly defined and would not work bit-banged.Yes.  You can get a single chip IDE  SATAconverter.  IDE is trivial to interface too.

Anton Erasmus · Answer

[Snipped]I did a very quick search on google, and the impression I got thatthese ICs are to connect an IDE device to a SATA controller. What theOP need would be a converter that connects a SATA device to an IDEcontroller.Regards  Anton Erasmus

Martin Maurer · Answer

Hello Anton,I at least found a few of these converters cheap on ebay.One of them uses a Marvell 88i8030 on it (which seems to be an old but widely used chip).Regards,       Martin

SATA / SATA II for embedded system ?

Join the Discussion

Didn't find your answer?