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Seagate SkyHawk Product Manual, Rev. L 7
www.seagate.com Introduction
1.1 About the SATA interface
The Serial ATA (SATA) 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, SATA makes the transition from parallel ATA easy by providing legacy software support. SATA was designed to allow
users to install a SATA host adapter and SATA disk drive in the current system and expect all of the existing applications to work as
normal.
The SATA interface connects each disk drive in a point-to-point configuration with the SATA host adapter. There is no master/slave
relationship with SATA devices like there is with parallel ATA. If two drives are attached on one SATA 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 SATA 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 SATA host adapter contains a set of registers that shadow the contents of the traditional device registers, referred to as the
Shadow Register Block. All SATA devices behave like Device 0 devices. For additional information about how SATA emulates parallel
ATA, refer to the “Serial ATA International Organization: Serial ATA Revision 3.2”. The specification can be downloaded from
www.sata-io.or
g.
Note
The host adapter may, optionally, emulate a master/slave environment to host software where two
devices on separate SATA 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 SATA environment.
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