This message is from the T13 list server.
SET FEATURES SOAPBOX ON OK, I am sure many of your watching all these messages today are saying: Wait a minute! Isn't Hale one of those people that complains about T13 not paying attention to the small people or to the overall future of ATA/ATAPI? Why is he defending T13's actions when obsoleting commands? Because there is a difference between obsoleting commands that have no value and not paying attention to the future of ATA/ATAPI. First, there is a significant cost in continuing to support some of these old commands. Frequently there are nastly issues concerning how one of these old command interact with some newer feature. Why continue to support command that make no sense given today's disk drive technology? Sceond, T13 does a terrible job of looking beyond the immediate future. Why do we have 48-bit LBA and not 64-bit LBA? Because T13 does not look beyond the immediate need to solve today's problem. T13 does a great job of ignoring markets (like ATA RAID controllers, even ATAPI!) that are not part of the main strean ATA hard disk drive market. There are times when even if there are no "X" supporters in the room T13 should be paying more attention to the needs of "X" (pick a value for "X"). Sorry if I sound confusing but I am not confused. I will continue to complain when T13 (and others) don't look beyond today's immediate problem when addressing an issue and I will continue to support efforts to keep the interface compatible with current technology. And I will continue to point out ATA reliability and performance issues and try to find solutions to those issues. Speaking specifically of R/W LONG... I am sorry if you have some old drive evaluation program (and you have lost the source code) and that program uses R/W LONG and that is the primary reason you think you need the ECC or the R/W LONG commands in a modern drive. I am sorry if without a 30 day test of a drive's ECC you could not justify that 6 week product evaluation cycle and therefore your management might think "Why do I have all these people running product evaluation tests?". SET FEATURES SOAPBOX OFF *** Hale Landis *** www.ata-atapi.com ***
