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2 Pipeline HD Mini Series SATA Product Manual, Rev. E
In addition, Serial ATA makes the transition from parallel ATA easy by providing 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 sys-
tem and expect all of your existing applications to work as normal.
The Serial ATA interface connects each disc drive in a point-to-point configuration 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 environment 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 mas-
ter/slave environment manages two sets of shadow registers. This is not a typical Serial ATA environ-
ment.
The Serial ATA host adapter and drive share the function of emulating parallel ATA device behavior to provide
backward compatibility with existing host systems and software. The Command and Control Block registers, PIO
and DMA data transfers, resets, and interrupts are all emulated.
The Serial ATA host adapter contains a set of registers that shadow the contents of the traditional device registers,
referred to as the Shadow Register Block. All Serial ATA devices behave like Device 0 devices. For additional
information about how Serial ATA emulates parallel ATA, refer to the “Serial ATA: High Speed Serialized AT
Attachment” specification. The specification can be downloaded from http://www.serialata.org.