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Jim's right that you can always get (i.e. DATA IN) fewer bytes than the host
specified in the ALLOCATION LENGTH or PARAMETER LIST LENGTH parts of the CDB
on a successful command.  This is not however true for DATA OUT commands.
The difference is that the device always has to terminate the command on a
success, and relies on the TRANSFER LENGTH value passed to it and counting
the number of bytes transferred in order to figure that out.  If the host
just stopped sending more data, the device just treats that as a pause in
the command, for which there is no timeout or other provision that allows
successful command termination.

Practical impact is that I don't think you can get fewer bytes on a
successful WRITE BUFFER command (or MODE SELECT, or LOG SELECT, etc...).

Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 10:06 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [t13] ATAPI DMA Byte Count usage for Data commands


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For tape,the common commands would be:

For DATA commands:
     the amount of data you actually get from the drive
     may be FEWER than requested if you encounter an error:
                       medium error, filemark, EOD, physical end of medium,
etc.
     <ALWAYS> look at the 'residual count' in the REQUEST SENSE response.

     READ(6), WRITE(6)

For ANY non-DATA  commands:
     You can always get FEWER bytes than requested from these
     commands if the device does not have the 'allocated' bytes
     available or valid for the particular command:
     This is normal, and is NOT an error.

     INQUIRY, REQUEST SENSE, MODE SENSE, LOG SENSE
     READ POSITION, READ BUFFER, WRITE BUFFER, etc.

- Jim Hatfield
   Sr. Firmware Engineer
   Overland Data Inc.
=====================================================

Subject:  [t13] ATAPI DMA Byte Count usage for Data commands

Question:

Are there any ATAPI Data commands (PLEASE note DATA (Read 10 etc)), where
the data length
is not the same as the requested length ?

For non-data commands, I know of
     Request Sense
     Mode Sense

Are there other common ones for CD/RW/DVD and Tape ?

Jeff

Jeff Wolford                       Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Senior Storage Architect
Storage Interface and Tools - PC Storage Group
    Voice: (281) 514-9465,     Pager: (800) 973-5739
Compaq Computer Corporation




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