Closer Look: SerialATA Hard Disk Drive

Well, this HDD looks almost the same as the regular Barracuda ATA V. Get closer now. I removed the protective SeaShield cover from the electronics PCB for your convenience:

The only difference, which you can notice with a naked eye is the new connector:

There are 7 contacts of the information connector on the left (the long pins are the earthing contacts and the short pins are the information ones) and power contacts on the right. As you see, there are a lot of “long” pins in the right part of the connector. This was designed to ensure proper HotPlug (and unplug, of course). Different length of the power contacts for each voltage (there are three voltages altogether: 3.3V, 5V and 12V) the HDD will always know which way the power supply connector is moving. In other words, it will be able to identify whether is being connected to or disconnected from the PSU.

The remarkable thing about the HDD electronics is a new LSI chip, which I have never come across before and failed to find in the Google search engine. We have already seen an 8MB cache buffer on other HDDs, though it is the first Seagate drive with a cache buffer like that. Anyway, the unknown LSI chip warms up our interest even more.

My initial suppositions about this chip being an ATA<->SATA converter, luckily turned out absolutely wrong. I would like to thank Gary Hendershot for the additional information about this chip, which I can’t wait to share with you.

In reality this chip is none other but an individual controller-transmitter of the serial interface. In other words, this chip simply connects the major hard disk drive controller with the SerialATA Host controller. The LSI chip core feature a beautiful name: “GigaBlaze”. You can find more details about this chip here and here.

This way, Seagate Barracuda SATA V HDD is really the first SATA-drive wit the native SerialATA interface support. No more doubts.

And this is a power adapter:

These adapters will be really demanded unless the mainboards get a corresponding connector onboard.

And these are the information SATA cables: