> > PATA isn't terminated, and is "designed" (cough) to work with cables > > between 10 and 18 inches. If the cable is shorter than 10 inches or > > longer than 18 inches then you are more likely to lose data. > > That is interesting but: > > 1. Notebooks have much shorter cables, as short as 2 inches.
Do they do something special to make this work reliably? > 2. 2 inch long 40 Pin IDE cables are probably also available. Just because something is offered for sale doesn't mean it works. > Iirc, If A transmission line is short enough, it doesn't need to be > terminated. Short enough is determined by data rate and rise time. IIRC, if it is short enough it isn't a transmission line. Is 2 inches short enough? > > PATA doesn't have error detection & correction on everything so your > > data is at risk. SATA does have error detection & correction on > > everything. > > Nice but you need a SATA transceiver for each Flash Card. So they don't make SATA flash cards yet? > > SATA allows cables up to 1 meter long. (I don't know what the > > minimum is.) I think eSATA allows 2 meters? > > Is SATA terminated. I don't know, but I assume it is. There's no reason not to. Perhaps the PATA "designers" (cough) were trying to spare users the horrible task of adding/removing terminators depending on where the drive was on the cable. > > SATA allows port multipliers, which are like a power cube tap, or a > > ethernet/firewire/usb hub. A port multiplier can fan out one SATA > > controller port to 15 drives. > > That might be a good point. However, Flash Cards are still parallel so > you are going to need a serial to parallel converter for each card. I'm talking about PATA vs SATA in general, not just flash cards. > Have you looked at SiliconImage's chips? > > http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=27 I'm not familiar with the SiI3124. I have a 3512. It works fine, but the max throughput I can get out of it is about 37 MB/s with one drive or 40 MB/s total with both drives. The same model drives get up to 65-70 MB/s per drive with the nforce4. I've seen complaints about slowness with some other SiliconImage SATA chips, I don't recall the exact part numbers. If the SiI3124 fixes the throughput problem and has a documented protocol for NCQ it would probably be a good choice. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
