Interfacing Arduino with SATA/ IDE?

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

Hi,

Has anyone tried interfacing Arduino with SATA/ IDE hard disks??

Can someone guide me in figuring out:

  • if it is possible at all
  • what does it take to get this done?

Please let me know?

Regards,
Radha.

2

I would be very surprised if this was practicable. As you have to read and write a sectors worth of data (512 bytes) in a transaction there is mostly likely going to be a sever data ram shortage to work with on a Arduino. Not sure what the serial data rate is for SATA but that too might be too much for a Arduino.

Lefty

3

How about using a VDIP module and a USB to SATA (or IDE) bridge?

-j

4

retrolefty, the Adafruit Wave Shield loads 512-byte sectors read serially from the SD card. It's very tight on RAM on an ATmega168, but it's possible. (That library assumes FAT16 formatting so you only need one sector at any given time to get to the data in a file.) I would imagine the SATA standard would allow a really slow device to clock its way through the process, but I don't know for a fact. The rest of the logic to use that data is of course the limiting factor.