Dieter wrote:
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?
Short PATA cables can indeed do UltraDMA.
2. 2 inch long 40 Pin IDE cables are probably also available.
Just because something is offered for sale doesn't mean it works.
In this case it does work.
HOWEVER, SATA is obviously such a superior choice that IMO it's not
really worth arguing other. Just ignore the old relics that still like
PATA. :)
So they don't make SATA flash cards yet?
They do make SATA flash cards.
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.
(responding to whomever Dieter is quoting here... Dieter trimmed the
attribution unfortunately)
Since SATA flash cards are available, luckily this is not true.
I'm talking about PATA vs SATA in general, not just flash cards.
Agreed.
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.
The 3124 is -vastly- better than the 311x/3512 family. Newer
generation, supports NCQ and port multipliers, speaks SATA directly
rather than hiding that inside an ASIC state machine, the list goes on.
311x/3512 was first-generation SATA, so it "looks like IDE" from the
standpoint of the OS driver. You /really/ want a SATA chip like 3124,
which natively speaks SATA FIS's (FIS == SATA frame or packet).
Hardware programming guide publicly available, thanks to Silicon Image:
http://gkernel.sourceforge.net/specs/sii/
Jeff
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