Patent ID: 8281044

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a cartridge enclosing a target serial hard disk drive comprising an interface connector; a carrier comprising a carrier controller, and a mating interface connector, wherein the carrier is configured to accept the cartridge and releasably attach the mating interface connector to the interface connector of the target serial hard disk drive, the carrier controller comprising: a first serial-to-parallel interface bridge that presents a serial data storage device mode interface to a data storage host adapter; a second serial-to-parallel interface bridge, coupled to the mating interface connector, that presents a serial host mode interface to the target serial hard disk drive; a data flow control circuit operably connected to the first serial-to-parallel interface bridge and the second serial-to-parallel interface bridge, wherein the data flow control circuit comprises a task file register; a controller unit, operably connected to the data flow control circuit, the task file register, and the second serial-to-parallel interface bridge, the controller unit comprising a processor and a command data buffer; wherein the data flow control circuit is operative to write a first data transfer command received on the task file register from the data storage host adapter to the command data buffer; wherein the controller unit is further operable to access executable instructions physically stored in a memory and, when executed, operable to cause the processor to access the first data transfer command stored in the command data buffer; generate a second data transfer command in the command data buffer corresponding to the first data transfer command; and transmit the second data transfer command to the data storage unit through the second serial-to-parallel interface bridge; and wherein the data flow control circuit, responsive to control signals provided by the controller unit, is further operative to directly interface data transfer signals of the data storage host adapter and the data storage unit via the first serial-to-parallel interface bridge and the second serial-to-parallel interface bridge.