Consider this...

Suppose I wanted to connect an ATA hard-drive to my Nios-DevKit (1S10/1S40/1C20).

The Santa Cruz connector electrically supports ATA, meaning that the VCC, GND connections match. I doubt this is a coincidence.

My question is this:

Has anyone connected a hard-disk to the Nios processor.

I have a need to store a large amount of data. This data will be passed to a host system via ethernet (perhaps via a web-server).

Here's the catch: I would like the ability to remove the drive and connect it to a standard PC, running Windows.

Figuring that it may be difficult to replicate the Windows FAT32 File System, I figure the "simplist" solution would be to run either uC/OS-II or Linux for Nios - assuming these OS'es support a FAT32 or equivalent File System. Better yet, can Win XP/2000 read a Linux O/S (through inodes, etc)?

Lastly, I see that opencores.org has an ATA interface to wishbone. Knowing that the wishbone & avalon busses are similar, it is feasible to use this core... However, I see that the core is in rev 0.2 and considered to be preliminary.

Has anyone used this ATA core, or written an avalon ATA component?

Thanks,

-Terry