Seagate SkyHawk SATA Product Manual, Rev. E
6
1.1
About the Serial ATA interface
The Serial ATA interface provides several advantages over the traditional (parallel) ATA interface. The primary advantages include:
• Easy installation and configuration with true plug-and-play connectivity.
It is not necessary to set any jumpers or other configuration options.
• Thinner and more flexible cabling for improved enclosure airflow and ease of installation.
• Scalability to higher performance levels.
In addition, Serial ATA makes the transition from parallel ATA easy by providing legacy software support. Serial ATA was designed to
allow users to install a Serial ATA host adapter and Serial ATA disk drive in the current system and expect all of the existing
applications to work as normal.
The Serial ATA interface connects each disk drive in a point-to-point configuration with the Serial ATA host adapter. There is no
master/slave relationship with Serial ATA devices like there is with parallel ATA. If two drives are attached on one Serial ATA host
adapter, the host operating system views the two devices as if they were both “masters” on two separate ports. This essentially
means both drives behave as if they are Device 0 (master) devices.
The Serial ATA host adapter and drive share the function of emulating parallel ATA device behavior to provide backward
compatibility with existing host systems and software. The Command and Control Block registers, PIO and DMA data transfers, resets,
and interrupts are all emulated.
The Serial ATA host adapter contains a set of registers that shadow the contents of the traditional device registers, referred to as the
Shadow Register Block. All Serial ATA devices behave like Device 0 devices. For additional information about how Serial ATA emulates
parallel ATA, refer to the “Serial ATA: High Speed Serialized AT Attachment” specification. The specification can be downloaded from
www.serialata.org
.
Note
The host adapter may, optionally, emulate a master/slave environment to host software where two devices on
separate Serial ATA ports are represented to host software as a Device 0 (master) and Device 1 (slave) accessed at
the same set of host bus addresses. A host adapter that emulates a master/slave environment manages two sets
of shadow registers. This is not a typical Serial ATA environment.
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