Product manual

2 Barracuda 7200.7 Serial ATA Product Manual, Rev. C
Figure 1. Barracuda 7200.7 Serial ATA disc drive
1.1 About the Serial ATA interface
The Serial ATA 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, Serial ATA makes the transition from parallel ATA easy by provid-
ing legacy software support. Serial ATA was designed to allow you to install a
Serial ATA host adapter and Serial ATA disc drive in your current system and
expect all of your existing applications to work as normal.
The Serial ATA interface connects each disc drive in a point-to-point configu-
ration with the Serial ATA host adapter. There is no master/slave relationship
with Serial ATA devices like there is with parallel ATA. If two drives are
attached on one Serial ATA 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.
Note. The host adapter may, optionally, emulate a master/slave environ-
ment to host software where two devices on separate Serial ATA
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 Serial ATA environ-
ment.