Companies and authorities of today often handle large amount of data, not unusually with a restricted content which should be kept secret from outsiders. One way of accomplish this is to encrypt stored data in real time. For this a hardware solution is ideal since it can be independent, fast enough, and easily added to already existing systems.
This report is a starting point to achieve this with two of the most common mass storage standards SATA and SCSI in focus. It is based on the task to develop a FPGA based SATA controller and investigate the possibility to ”speak” SCSI with SATA devices.
The working process has involved theoretical studies, system design, test driven development using simulations and hardware tests and technical investigation.
The study resulted in a SCSI-to-SATA translation investigation pointing out difficulties and presenting a translation model. A SATA host was also implemented in VHDL on a Virtex-5 FPGA that can execute a number of SATA commands on different devices. Simulations performed shows that the total latency reaches one μs/32 bits in the SATA host and that should not be much of a problem for most applications in a possible bridge solution.
Source: Linköping University
Author: Landström, Erik