Group Actions
Engagement
  • Author Author: iexpress
  • Date Created: Date Created
  • Views 3227 views
  • Likes 3 likes
  • Comments 6 comments
Related
Recommended

IDE ATA Hard Drive with ATmega328p MCU as Controller Question

iexpress

Hi All,

 

I tried to open a discussion but the website wouldn't publish it so I just created a quick blog about this project.

 

I was planning to make a quick IDE hard drive controller with an ATmega328p, and was wondering if anyone might know how the internal buffer addresses are incremented inside the hard drive during read/write operations?

 

Is there a set rate data has to be read from or written to the hard drive, or would the read/write pins be toggled to load the next set of 16 bit word during the read/write operations?

 

I'm a little confused, searching for tutorials, but they're not describing how the addresses are incremented, they're just saying read or write 512 bytes in one shot for either read or write sector operation.

 

Your help would be appreciated, thanks.

 

I know there are pre-written libraries, but I'll be interfacing this in a circuit of it's ow connected directly to an ATmega which will act solely as a dedicated IDE controller using the LBA access scheme.

  • After trying for a few hours, I managed to be able to read the first set of data after issuing read device id command.

    Still unsure what the sequence is to write sectors, but when I try to read a sector, it only hands me the first entry.

     

    In this screenshot, the last entry in the terminal shows as 0xED which is the lower 8 bits of the first entry of the Device ID command.

    Supposedly we're supposed to read the data from register 0, but when I go to toggle the Read pin and reselect the Read pin, all entries after that are 0xFF, as if the entire device is disabled.

     

    Any ideas what the proper sequence is for reading or writing to an IDE drive?

     

    Thanks.

    image