TABLE OF CONTENTS Cables and connectors are like the oil pump in your car. Under normal conditions it s out of sight, out of mind.When problems with it occur, the total system is affected.
Let s take a look at four uses and applications of cables and connectors in the interest of establishing requirements.
Use Case 1: PC with disk drives
Use Case 2: Laptop internal, swap bay, and docking station
Use Case 3: Directly attached internal storage
Use Case 4: Directly attached external storage, called Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD)
In the PC use case, the system has a basic tower, or desktop PC, with one or two HDDs and one or two CDRW/DVD optical devices. The cable-connector requirements are:
Extremely price sensitive, must be lower cost than today s parallel ATA cable
0.5 to 1.0 meter cable length
Small enough to avoid airflow blockage
Assumes use by end user; no instructions, no special tools
Robust mechanical retention, adequate to survive the shipping of an assembled system
Shielding adequate to pass open box EMI restrictions
Adequate to survive standard human body ESD
Works for HDDs and CDRW/DVD
The requirements for this class of PC do not include hot-plug capability for cable-attached devices. The alternative to hot plugging is to shut down the PC and replace the cable-attached device.
Figure 6.1 shows the basic, single-channel cable/connector for parallel-ATA on the left and the equivalent Serial ATA cable on the right. The big improvement lies...
