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> > I'd very much like to connect on this.
> > In design, there's nothing like not thinking
> > about a problem to make it then appear.

> I think you are misunderstanding.

Thank you again for offering me this hope.

> The sender is NEVER allowed to send "garbage" bytes
> for a command in which the command execution
> is expected to be a success
> (i.e. as soon as it does send any such bytes,
> it must then follow up with ultimately
> indicating the the command failed,
> and thus is then usually retried).

Superb.  The major-vendor hard drives that reportedly do so (and include the extra 
garbage in their Crc) then are more or less clearly out of spec.

Can anyone easily quote specific chapter & verse from the spec for me here, something 
I could forward to justify a special effort to overcome this incompatibility, yet more 
specific than "just buy Maxtor"?

> The sender can always pause the transfer
> whenever it wants.  But it must pause
> it when it runs out of user data to send,

Or the sender may terminate and later restart any time it runs out temporarily, yes?  
For example, while recovering from a soft error as common as, or more common than, 
say, once per gigabyte?

> The sender can always pause the transfer
> whenever it wants.  But it must pause
> it when it runs out of user data to send,
> or is informed by the receiver
> that there is no space in the receiver
> to hold the data.  When the condition that generated
> the pause is cleared, then data transfer can resume.
>
> A receiver can always force a pause whenever it wants.
> But it must do so when it runs out of space
> to store the data.
>
> Since timing conditions prevent
> the ability to insure that pauses are "on the dime,"
> the receiver must, under some circumstances
> (all specified in the protocol)
> pause when it still has a few bytes of fifo space left.
>
> A lot of designs just always pause when there is some
> space left to make sure that no over run occurs.

So far so good.

Sorry to say, I lost you after that.

I don't see an answer to my core question:

> > Help me get straight on the standard first?
> >
> > Should I believe the claim I hear:
> > that Ansi UDma allows the sender (host when writing,
> > device when reading) to clock zero, two, or four bytes
> > of extra garbage past the terminating pause?

Pending a free, fast, & good answer to that question,  I'll go ahead and post 
separately to answer what you said specifically.

I'm pleased to share I think you have pinpointed many of the areas where your 
experience, perhaps centered on Ata-connected non-removable media, differs from my 
experience, centered on "removable media, exchangeable heads, variable block sizes, 
and the use of commands not standardised before both the host & the device shipped".

Thanks again in advance.   Pat LaVarre


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