Windows 7 - RS-232 over SATA

Asked By Steve

18-Jan-10 08:56 AM

Hello all.  I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this
question...if not if someone would kindly point to the correct place I
will take my question there.

Anyway here is my question.  Is there isuch a thing as a SATAS to
RS-232 converter (like USB to RS-232).  I know this probably sounds
pretty strange but I have a CD/DVD autoloader with 4 drives in it.
There are robotics to effect the loading and of unloading of discs
from spindle stacks to the drives.  Currently the device requires two
connections to the PC.  The first connection is a firewire connection
for the drives.  The second is a serial (RS-232) connection for the
robotics control.

What I would like to do is modify the thing so that it can be conected
with a single cable.  I know this can be done with USB (in fact I have
done this simply by hiding a simple USB hub inside the duplicator) but
with 4 drives sharing the USB bandwidth it is not as fast as I would
like.  I also know that I could go to USB 3.0 but it does not appear
as though there are any USB 3.0 to IDE (the drives are IDE) converters
out there yet.

So I was wondering if there was not some way to run a single SATA cable
from the PC to the device.  Then in the device I could have a port
multiplier to split the single SATA cable to five ports (one for each
drive and one for the robotics).  In order for this to work though I
would obviously need a way to go from SATA to RS-232

Any thoughts or pointers will be appreciated.

18-Jan-10 01:04 PM

SATA is for disk access only.

18-Jan-10 12:39 PM

Yes, Radio. Use a bluetooth serial adaptor at your robotics end.

--
Adrian C

18-Jan-10 07:43 PM

It may be possible to use "SCSI passthru interface" to send your changer
commands
over the sata - but then you need to make a device to filter these command
out,
before they reach the drive(s). Or, use commands that are ignored by your
drives.
--pa