The SATA (Serial ATA) interface is intended to expand and eventually replace the parallel ATA interface that has been the standard connection for hard drives and CD-ROM/DVD drives in Personal Computers for nearly twenty years. SATA, a high-speed serial version of ATA, is designed to maintain compatibility with software written for the standard ATA implementation, thus easing the transition to SATA. New advances in SATA provide new capabilities such as Native Command Queuing that improve overall drive performance and greater reliability. In addition, the latest version of SATA (called SATA II) adds new features such as higher transfer rates, Port Selectors, Port Multipliers, and enclosure services, making it easier to implement low cost, high capacity, storage subsystems for server implementations. This book provides essential information for Systems Engineers, System Validation Engineers, Hardware Designers, and Software Developers.
SATA Storage Technology provides ATA background information necessary to understand the Serial ATA implementation. This book provides detailed information regarding the serial protocol, commands, and electrical interface. A tutorial approach is taken to facilitate thorough understanding, using numerous illustrations, tables and examples. The text is also designed to provide easy to access valuable reference information.

Book Chapters

• The Evolution of Parallel ATA
• The Motivation for SATA
• SATA Overview
• Introduction to FIS Transfers
• FIS Types and Formats
• Transport and Link Protocols
• FIS Retry
• Data Flow Control
• Physical Layer Functions
• Error Detection
• The Command Protocol
• The Control Protocol
• Sata II Features
• Native Command Queuing
• Port Multipliers
• Port Selectors
• Enclosure Services
• SATA Initialization
• Physical Layer
• Form Factors
• Hot Plug
• Link Power Management
• BIST Features

Don Anderson has over 30 years of experience in the technical electronics and computer industry. He has authored of fourteen books covering various aspects of computer hardware and system design. Topics include system architectures, parallel bus technologies, serial bus technologies, and processor architectures. Don has trained thousands of engineers in the US and around the world. Before joining MindShare, Don worked for Compaq, Schlumberger, Geosource and Hewlett Packard.

MindShare, Inc. was founded in 1988 to bring computer architecture-related training to the hardware and software design communities. Since then, we have expanded our course offerings to include SAS™, SATA™, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, PCI Express™, PCI-X™, PCI™ and HyperTransport™ System Architectures as well as Pentium 4 and Opteron Processor Architectures.

MindShare instructors travel the world delivering customized training courses to the very companies that lead the high-tech industry. Our instructors have tremendous computer engineering experience. Our consistent research and training efforts ensure that instructors and authors are always up to date on the latest technological trends.