Okay, gotcha... and agreed. The first document I attached at the beginning of this post was the installation guide from Hitachi. It's a short doc, but covers the handling of the drive. It also has the suggested mounting and the connector pinout. For my intended pocket-size all-in-one "wonderboard", this should fit the bill.

I also looked at SATA some time ago... found the same, no real documentation available for protocol, etc. I have found numerous SATA to IDE converters... they handle the protocol and hardware interface so it's basically transparent. In theory, one would expect it to work with a recent IDE BIOS that can support the extended 48-bit addressing. Here's one I found:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Addonic ... gLOhPD_BwE

You can also find some very inexpensive ones if you head far east

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Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust

An easy option, but not that nice, is to use a PATA to SATA adapter. They are quite cheap.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Are you sure about SASi? I built a simple async HW interface with a couple of TTL on a perfboard

Edit: maybe it was early SCSi though

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Author of the GeckOS multitasking operating system, the usb65 stack, designer of the Micro-PET and many more 6502 content: http://6502.org/users/andre/

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Well, it's likely been pushing 2 months since I started down the path on the old Hitachi Microdrive (which was originally IBM technology, including the facilities and IP). I've had the Microdrive running on a 3.3V makeshift system and it was fairly simple to get it working with my earlier BIOS written for a Compact Flash card and with Richard Leary's DOS/65.

I've spent more time working on an updated BIOS which also supports multiple sector transfers and can enable/disable the Write Cache capability. The new BIOS also supports the NXP SC28L92 DUART (both channels and the timer as a jiffy clock) and the Maxim DS1511 RTC. In short, I'm quite happy with the performance of the drive. It's quicker than all of the CF Cards I have (everything is running in PIO Mode) and running at 8 MHz, transfer rates are around 366KB/second on Block reads and 320KB/second on Block writes. The results are also more consistent than CF Cards, as there's no wear leveling and other internal maintenance that takes place. It's also a nice retro technology and I picked up a quantity of 10- 6GB Drives for under $17 each (free shipping), all new and sealed in OEM static bags with silica gel bags.

I'm still fine tuning the new BIOS, which is a bit larger than the previous one it's based on... but that also includes additional code to support the second DUART channel, multi-block transfers and some additional features. Fortunately it still fits in the allocated EEPROM space, which is 2KB less 160 bytes for I/O (5- selects at 32 bytes wide each).

I'm now starting to work on an IDE utility that will allow more exercising and bench-marking of the drive, along with some editing and accessing the SMART data. That plus working on a daughterboard for the existing C02 Pocket SBC that will allow more prototyping for the next the Pocket SBC 3 version. So much to do and so little free time... ah, retirement, who knew?

_________________
Regards, KM
https://github.com/floobydust