SATA on Lime2 GPIO header?

Started by bbb, January 31, 2023, 12:46:22 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

bbb

Hi,

In a few days I will be a proud owner of an A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-e16 board. I was reading the documentation carefuly and wondered if it is possible to wire a secondary SATA port through one of the GPIO headers?

According to the user manual page 28, the current SATA connector is connected through some capacitors to the MCU directly. So I think it should be working if I copy that and choose 4 other pins on the header and wire the secondary SATA connector to that. But how should I tell the driver which pins are which? I plan to use Debian on it if that is relevant.

LubOlimex

Hmm, maybe I don't understand the issue properly but the A20 chip has one SATA controller. You can't directly connect two SATA devices to one SATA controller and expect them to work properly.
Technical support and documentation manager at Olimex

bbb

I was not know that the A20 has only one SATA controller.
I have made some research and find that the only way to have multiple SATA devices is to use a port multiplier or use the USB interface which is much slower.

Thank you for the answer and to force me to think :)