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A high-quality SATA PCI 2.5" hard card, to celebrate SATA's 20th birthday

rabbitholecomputing

Vendor The First
It's hard to believe SATA is 20 years old, but on January 7th, 2003, the SerialATA working group published the Serial ATA 1.0a specification, and the computing world finally had a low-cost serialized storage interface for the masses. By the end of the same year, Adaptec had released their SATAConnect The ubiquitous Silicon Image SiI3112A chipset, as used in many, many PCI storage cards, is just as old,

TL;DR We cloned a high-quality SATA PCI card, and are making a SATA 1.0 hard card out of it. See below for photos of how that is playing out.

We chose the Adaptec ASH-1205SA (The AAR-1210SA RAID uses the same board design, the only difference is firmware), which was based on the SiI3112A SATA controller IC. It's a four layer board, with internal ground and power planes. All components are surface-mount.

Since it won't be possible for us to ship these boards with firmware, eventual users will need to flash their own Macintosh-compatible firmware to the board, via flashrom. There's not yet any firm timeline for when these will be available for purchase, and it's unlikely it will be available before March. The prototype PCBs do not have beveled card-edges, as production units would.

Here's the first 1:1 assembled and tested clone:

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Here's an original Adaptec ASH-1205/1210SA (same PCB) that we cloned, next to the resulting clone board. Some of the capacitors from the Adaptec board were cannibalized to test the initial prototype. The majority of the passive components, as well as the voltage regulators on the PCB, were assembled via pick-and-place. Once we received the partially-assembled prototypes, we then hand-mounted the SiI3112, harvested from a low-quality Chinese donor board via hot air rework. A small quantity of the flash memory was purchased off eBay, and soldered down.

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Now that we've validated that the 1:1 clone works well, here's where we're evolving this design to be. It has one M.2 SATA connector, and one power+SATA connector for a 2.5" SATA SSD, with two mounting holes in the PCB to securely fasten the 2.5" drive from the bottom.

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ArmorAlley

Well-known member
Can Sil3112 support 4 ports? I've never seen one and I've always supposed that it won't.
Would a 64-bit version be possible too?
Too much bandwidth is never enough.
 

Daniël

Well-known member
Can Sil3112 support 4 ports? I've never seen one and I've always supposed that it won't.
Would a 64-bit version be possible too?
Too much bandwidth is never enough.

The amount of ports it supports is in the model number, 2 :)

There is the SiI3114 four port controller, but I believe it doesn't (properly) work with the Mac SiI3112 ROMs floating about.
 

joshc

Well-known member
I guess you are not doing a waiting list but just posting here to say 1) This is cool and 2) I am interested in getting one when they are available. Happy to do testing in a Sawtooth as well.
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
So since I’m a simple guy: this will allow for easy, native SATA drive use on, say, a QuickSilver G4 or something? Sign me up, I’d buy one…provided there’s instructions on how to flash it :p
 

cjtmacclassic

Well-known member
Since this is a very early edition of SATA, would this work in say, a PCI-X G5? They have known issues with SATA support and rarely work with anything other than contemporary spinning rust, at least in my experience.
 

macuserman

Well-known member
I'm super excited to see this project as I was reading it I immediately thought if only they would add an M.2 connecter and much to my delight as a I continued reading you have!!!! Next wish list item would be to slap a couple USB ports on the front, that would really put it over the top on some of these limited interface machines. Imagine being able to drop this in a 6500, get USB ports, and a sata drive without having to snake a sata cable through the machine somehow and up to the drive bay etc etc etc. This would be a bang up product, not that it isn't already.
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
The support of M.2 is nice, and brings with it several options, hopefully not with much of an increased selling price.
 

dosdude1

Well-known member
One thing I'd recommend is ditching the TSOP EEPROM in favor of a PLCC32 one (which can be socketed for even better ease of use). That way it can be more easily soldered and programmed externally if necessary. Also, the Sil3112 has two pins that can be used to configure RAID mode enable and BA5 enable. Most Mac ROMs require these options both be disabled, but most Sil3112 cards I've seen do have (at least provisions for) jumper settings for both these options. For an enabled state, you just pull pins 42 (for RAID mode) and 43 (for BA5) low through a ~1k resistor. For a disabled state, do not pull low. Configuration this way should also not require use of the I2C configuration EEPROM, unless of course there are other options that you're utilizing.
 

rabbitholecomputing

Vendor The First
One thing I'd recommend is ditching the TSOP EEPROM in favor of a PLCC32 one (which can be socketed for even better ease of use). That way it can be more easily soldered and programmed externally if necessary. Also, the Sil3112 has two pins that can be used to configure RAID mode enable and BA5 enable. Most Mac ROMs require these options both be disabled, but most Sil3112 cards I've seen do have (at least provisions for) jumper settings for both these options. For an enabled state, you just pull pins 42 (for RAID mode) and 43 (for BA5) low through a ~1k resistor. For a disabled state, do not pull low. Configuration this way should also not require use of the I2C configuration EEPROM, unless of course there are other options that you're utilizing.
Noted. In a future iteration, we'll almost surely add support for PLCC EEPROM, but the TSOP one can be programmed in-situ with flashrom, and quite possibly other vendor-supplied utilities, so you can program it without needing to remove the IC at all. I've already concluded we don't need to retain the small EEPROM.
 

ivanshpak

Member
Hello everyone, I don’t want to confuse anyone, but I’ll say a little, there is an intel 31244 from Seritek-1v4, these chips are in China (over 2000), they are faster and they are more desirable than Sil3112, I enclose all the technical documentation, guys do it
 

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rabbitholecomputing

Vendor The First
Hello everyone, I don’t want to confuse anyone, but I’ll say a little, there is an intel 31244 from Seritek-1v4, these chips are in China (over 2000), they are faster and they are more desirable than Sil3112, I enclose all the technical documentation, guys do it
With all due respect, this is not relevant to the conversation in any way, shape, or form. We're discussing a two port SATA card, which is more than sufficient for most use cases. You're free to design your own card around this part, if you have the ability or resources to do so. Start a thread about it if you so desire, but there's no need to hijack this one. What's the point of this post?
 

ivanshpak

Member
Use the full length card, majestic PCB, for two 2.5 HDD like a "Sonnet Fussion Dual" card, and two M.2 AHCI and RAID0 option
 

ivanshpak

Member
With all due respect, this is not relevant to the conversation in any way, shape, or form. We're discussing a two port SATA card, which is more than sufficient for most use cases. You're free to design your own card around this part, if you have the ability or resources to do so. Start a thread about it if you so desire, but there's no need to hijack this one. What's the point of this post?
You have come a long way, you are great fellows, and my comment that as a discussion, I shared my thoughts with you, just like that. Do not neglect the advice, we are one community in different parts of the world, and each of us contributes to the community
 

dosdude1

Well-known member
Noted. In a future iteration, we'll almost surely add support for PLCC EEPROM, but the TSOP one can be programmed in-situ with flashrom, and quite possibly other vendor-supplied utilities, so you can program it without needing to remove the IC at all. I've already concluded we don't need to retain the small EEPROM.
Well, another reason I bring this up is because there's this one ROM, for the "SeriTek 1S2" Sil3112-based card, that has some weird protection in it making it ONLY work with two specific EEPROM types, a PM39LV040 or MX29LV040. As such, some users may want to install one of these onto this card in order to utilize that ROM. The 1S2 ROM is special in that it works in old world PowerMacs, and supports as old as Macintosh System 7. Now from what I've seen the aforementioned EEPROMs do come in a TSOP and PLCC32 package, though I don't know if the TSOP footprint matches what you have on the board. If so, though, it may be worth pre-installing one of those EEPROM models when selling the card, just to ensure it is compatible with the 1S2 ROM.
 

rabbitholecomputing

Vendor The First
Well, another reason I bring this up is because there's this one ROM, for the "SeriTek 1S2" Sil3112-based card, that has some weird protection in it making it ONLY work with two specific EEPROM types, a PM39LV040 or MX29LV040. As such, some users may want to install one of these onto this card in order to utilize that ROM. The 1S2 ROM is special in that it works in old world PowerMacs, and supports as old as Macintosh System 7. Now from what I've seen the aforementioned EEPROMs do come in a TSOP and PLCC32 package, though I don't know if the TSOP footprint matches what you have on the board. If so, though, it may be worth pre-installing one of those EEPROM models when selling the card, just to ensure it is compatible with the 1S2 ROM.
We're aware of the above situation. The TSOP pinout is a standardized JEDEC pinout, fortunately.
 

aperezbios

Well-known member
Well, another reason I bring this up is because there's this one ROM, for the "SeriTek 1S2" Sil3112-based card, that has some weird protection in it making it ONLY work with two specific EEPROM types, a PM39LV040 or MX29LV040. As such, some users may want to install one of these onto this card in order to utilize that ROM. The 1S2 ROM is special in that it works in old world PowerMacs, and supports as old as Macintosh System 7. Now from what I've seen the aforementioned EEPROMs do come in a TSOP and PLCC32 package, though I don't know if the TSOP footprint matches what you have on the board. If so, though, it may be worth pre-installing one of those EEPROM models when selling the card, just to ensure it is compatible with the 1S2 ROM.
PLCC32 EEPROM support added:
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