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I am making a very low-cost system with a Allwinner A20 chip as the heart. I would like to have a main boot drive and a separate disk drive. Sadly, to my knowledge there is only one SATA port.

I can't drop either for various reasons, and this is an embedded system, for those wondering.

Is there a way to split a single SATA port into two SATA ports?

ocrdu
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R Baker
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  • Google mentions people using SATA port multipliers on the A20, so it is apparently possible, at least on some hardware. You could get one and see if it works. – user1850479 Jan 16 '23 at 02:37

1 Answers1

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there exist RAID controllers that split a SATA port into several SATA ports, but if your goal is to save money this is not a good approach. prices seems to start around $20 for cards, so the chips are probably $5 or something like that, this is more than twice the price of the A20.

perhaps use NAND flash or EMMC for your boot drive instead, the A20 has no shortage of interfaces for flash or sd cards..

Alternatively you could use USB for one of the disks. (usb to sata cards start at around $2)

Jasen Слава Україні
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