I start by saying that I'm not an electrical engineer, I've got a basic understanding of things from school and from work (I'm a long time computer programmer), but this is not much my field of competence.
I'm in the process of evaluating the feasibility of a device that I'd like to try to get designed and produced. But, even before paying a specialist for a feasibility study, I'd like to understand how much I'm far from reality.
The focus of the device (90% of its functionality) will be on writing data on an SSD disks connected via a SATA port, so I'll need some kind of chip capable to do that (or, in extrema ratio, to get one designed for it). Is this a realistic thing, can a SATA controller be just bought and used easily on a board, or even designed from scratch? (so to have just one chip that do everything)?
Best Answer
A number of ARM SOC chips have provision for a SATA interface, so I don't think that requirement is a particularly huge barrier. For example, the Allwinner and Texas Instruments ARM-based SOCs- SATA and even SATA II are available.
Simply make sure that you're using a chip that supports SATA and feed it copious amounts of memory, a real operating system such as Linux, and a lot of cycles to make it happen. If the requirement is written in from the start, I don't think it will be your biggest problem. It does push the required level of hardware sophistication up to around the Raspberry Pi level (GHz-class CPU with lots of memory).