IDE driver for mini2440 board under Linux?

[k-meleon]

Hi everyone!

Has someone implemented an IDE driver under Linux for the mini2440
board? I want to connect a HD to the board and first thought, that
USB is the best way. Well, I didn't know, that the S3C2440 only
supports USB1.1, so I'm looking for a faster solution.

Has anyone some useful tips+hints?

Thank you so much!

Best regards
Sven

[ekilab]

SDHC flash maximum capacity(4G/16G/32G) you can afford at highest speed they sell(50x/66x/100x?) might be 10 times faster than USB1.1 at full speed.
SD interface spec if i remember right is 4bit wide spi clocked at 25MHz resulting 100MHz half duplex.

100baseTX is 100Mbit full duplex, allthough for disk type interface most of the traffic is half duplex in all but servers.

one methode would be to have a SAN box such as NASU2 or NSLU2 in the Ethernet, and one or two boxed USB2 SATA disks (they currently sell 500G disks at around 59€ in Finnish markets)

they have started selling SAN boxex with internal disks, but prices are still way up high.

and the hard way:

the way that it is done in another board:
http://www.armdesigner.com/EM2440-II.html
http://www.armdesigner.com/xsms/html37/ ... 729632.pdf

look page 5 and LDE interface (We have CEMERA interface, they have LDE )
page 6 shows the bad part: it is a USB to IDE bridge, so speed will be the same as with external 12Mbit usb-ide converter.

drivers you dont necessarily need, as 2.6x kernel on the present boards finds such usbharddisks itself.


best way would be making direct copy of their interface
this might be illegal but it is hardly something that can be patented, and if you do it for hobby,
dont worry.

[ekilab]

another solution would be havinf ATA interface in the memory bus:
http://www.simtec.co.uk/products/EB2410ITX/
this design implements IDE by a FPGA or actually CPLD, a kind of bunch of GALs/PALs :
http://www.simtec.co.uk/products/EB2410 ... ck-med.png

then question is: how to implement ATA (or SATA for that matter) interface from 32bit address and 32bit data bus running at 100MHz or less.

http://www.altera.com/literature/wp/wp-aab090305.pdf
http://www.altera.com/literature/an/an495.pdf
and code for above:
http://www.altera.com/literature/an/an4 ... xample.zip
http://www.altera.com/support/examples/max/exm-max.html

http://china.xilinx.com/publications/xc ... -iwave.pdf

the next is an 16bit implementation that is slower (80mbit) than 100Mbit Ethernet , so I see it slow.
http://www.seagate.com/content/pdf/whit ... Mar-06.pdf

discalaimer:
No semiconductor manufacturer pays me to promote their products, and partially to prove that I point you to two arch rivals
products to stay neutral.