Data transmission rate regulation for serial interface large-capacity storage apparatus

Abstract

The invention discloses a system and a method for executing data transferring rate adjustment to improve the effective data transfer rate of a serial ATA storage apparatus. When the data is transferred, the insertion of an ALIGN primitive element reduces the data transferring rate. A receiving device only abandons the ALIGN primitive element. Thus a receiving data First-In First-Out (FIFO) is not filled in and a flow control sequence with less flow control demand prevents the data FIFO from overflow. The advantage of the ALIGN primitive element instead of the conventional flow control is that the ALIGN does not cause a roundtrip signal switching delay and discontinuation and later starts the data transfer.

Description

technical field [0001] One or more aspects of this disclosure generally relate to serial data transfers using the Serial ATA (SATA) protocol, and more particularly, to regulating data transfer rates to minimize the use of hold primitives for flow control. Background technique [0002] The Serial ATA Disk Access Protocol is used to transfer data between system memory and one or more disks. Most Serial ATA storage devices have very limited data transfer throughput compared to system memory bandwidth. Sustained write throughput can be as low as 100MB / sec for tape-based drives. Consequently, these Serial ATA storage devices can become a performance bottleneck when coupled to fast host processors that can sustain transfer rates of 300MB / sec (as described by the Serial ATA specification). [0003] The Serial ATA protocol specifies a flow control mechanism to regulate the data transfer rate. In particular, the transfer of data from the host processor to the Serial ATA storage de...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Flow control introduces inefficiencies because each transfer between the Serial ATA storage device and the host device incurs several cycles of latency (limited to a specified maximum) due to round-trip handshaking across the Serial ATA interface

Simply increasing the size of the data FIFO to store more incoming data can be used to delay the first occurrence of the flow control sequence, but will not improve the effective transfer rate once the data FIFO has been filled in the first place

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