Two SATA hard drives on one SATA channel

Question

If you connect two SATA hard drives to one physical SATA port using SATA splitter cable, what BIOS will display under that SATA port? How can such splitter cables work? SATA is designed in the way that implies one SATA channel - one SATA device relationship, opposed to PATA where we have Master and Slave devices on a single channel (although they use two different physical ports). So how two SATA devices can operate on a single SATA channel?

Solution

You can't connect simultaneously two SATA hard drives to one physical SATA port. The cable you are talking about is called SAS to Dual Port SATA. (example)

Comments

[Thalys]

Are you sure its a signal splitter cable? I've never heard of a sata data splitter cable before.

[igntec]

I know there are SATA port multipliers, but they are separate external devices, so when I read about SATA splitter cable I thought that maybe there are some sort of "built-in port multipliers" and splitter cable can split data stream. Well, I think you are right, there is no such thing, at least "official". There is just no sense in it. Interesting, controller must support port multiplier to use one, so I think port multiplier has different set of registers.

[Ismael Miguel]

What are those cables used for? Are there even drives that use that? o.O