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Drives do test themselves. The manner and degree of testing is vendor unique. The SMART interface allows the results (most notably pass/fail) to be communicated to the system. While pas/fail is standardized, more detailed test results are communicated in a standard manner, but the contents are vendor unique (since the tests are vendor unique). Jim -----Original Message----- From: Thomas Colligan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 7:21 PM To: Hale Landis; ata reflector Subject: Re: [t13] future of R/W long This message is from the T13 list server. Now hold On. When I put those proposals in front of the t13 Committee few years ago and emphasized that a drive could and should be able to test its self. That includes the microprocessor and its hardware. I can't quite remember the negative comments about the ideas and the insults. But what can you expect. Something's never change. I think the large sector size work and investigation was done by another group. I think Gene was part if that. On 3/12/02 3:23 PM, "Hale Landis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This message is from the T13 list server. > > > On Tue, 12 Mar 2002 13:54:13 -0800, McGrath, Jim wrote: >> This message is from the T13 list server. >> >> going forward it's not even clear that ECC will be linked with 512 byte >> sectors. > > When I make my first "large physical sector" proposal I asked the T13 > members to think about this and how they would continue to support > R/W Long testing. > > Lets assume the current R/W Long scheme (Harlan's implementation or > something similar) is used but the sectors are 4K bytes and there are > up to 500 bytes of ECC data. Anyone want to estimate how long it > would take just to walk a single "bad bit" though such a sector+ECC. > Then how about walking a 2 "bad bits"? Or combinations of multiple > errors? I'm not sure any of us would live long enough to see such a > test complete (even if you could find a computer system that could > run that long!). > > A question for those of you that buy disk drives... When you purchase > a disk drive don't you assume that someone has verified that the > drive's microprocessor(s) and buffer memory function correctly? > (There has never been a way to test a microprocessor in a drive from > a host system.) If you need to test a drive's ECC logic from the > host, then why don't you also need to test the drive's microprocessor > and buffer memory too from a host? Why the "double standard"? > > > > *** Hale Landis *** www.ata-atapi.com *** > > >
