SATA

Apparently, there are three supposedly definitive, conflicting standards for SATA. It may be best to wait for the industry to shake out a little more completely, before trying to write SATA drivers.

If you want to try anyway, then get the ATA7, and ATA8 technical docs from www.t13.org. Then maybe try paying $25 to get the technical specs from www.sata-io.org. Hopefully, the discrepancies between the standards aren't too bad.

Introduction

SATA, short for Serial ATA, is a bus interface for communicating with mass storage devices (such as disk drives, optical drives, etc). SATA provides higher transfer rates than PATA and is backward compatible. If an OS does not recognize SATA, it can use drives like ordinary PATA drives with no issues. The SATA specification is split into three distinct protocol 'layers'.

• Physical Layer - Information relating to the physical connectors, etc. Not especially relevant here.
• Link Layer
• Transport Layer

Detection and Initialization

Send a standard IDENTIFY command to the drive (0xEC). The drive should respond with an error in the ERR bit of the Status Register, and a pair of "signature bytes". On the Primary ATA bus, you get the signature bytes by reading IO ports 0x1F4 and 0x1F5, and you should see values of 0x3C and 0xC3.

See Also

AHCI

External Links

• The Serial ATA International Organization
• http://www.ata-atapi.com -- Public Domain C driver sourcecode, including SATA, Busmatering DMA, ATAPI -- not perfect, but good.

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