Hi everyone,
I have a new version of a board of ours on which I
have put Marvells 88sa8052 ATA <-> SATA bridge.
I have tried it out using an off the shelf ATA <-> sata convertor and
it works fine. In fact I had soldered the convertor ATA side to the
former board version exactly as I (believe to) have routed
the chip on the board; and I put pulups/downs exactly as I saw
them on the convertor (unless I have made a mistake yet to be
discovered but I have checked a number of times already).
The chip I am using is taken from such a convertor (tested to work)
and... sort of works on my board. It does fine as long as I do not try
to write to the disk a longer buffer (100 megabytes copy via a 128k buffer
works just fine; give copy (I can do that easily, it is under
my control) a 4M buffer and I get lots of retries, takes forever
(about a minute vs. about 10S)...
I have checked the usual suspects - powers are stable and clean (during
the test, too), clock oscillator seems to run smoothly, the handshake signals
to the ATA side are OK.
The SATA cable is about 3 cm long, two pairs wound in copper foil,
properly connecting foil etc. to gnd points - and it seems to
work OK, no difference to 2 other - may be 2-3 times longer - cables
(ATA ribbon) I tried. Then it is just the longer write which causes the
problem.
I realize this is a long shot but someone on the list might have had to deal
with this or something similar and something might click.
Thanks,
Dimiter
------------------------------------------------------
Dimiter Popoff Transgalactic Instruments
http://www.tgi-sci.com
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/didi_tgi/
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