This message is from the T13 list server.
On Thu, 09 Jan 2003 16:45:58 -0800, Thomas Colligan wrote: >This message is from the T13 list server. >You really do not know. Your back pedaling. You are partly right... I don't know what percentage of CD/DVD drives that ship worldwide each year that support firmware upgrades. Do you know? But if this was a common feature of CD and DVD drives then I would think you would be able to look at a drive's ID data or the drive's printed label or the drive's PCB or the drive's chipset and determine who made it so you could find their web site and find the firmware upgrade software. I assume your company ships only drives that support firmware upgrades, and that is probably good, probably not necessary, but probably good. But just because your company ships a few million of the 200 million (or more) CD/DVD drives each year I'm not sure you are seeing a very good cross section of the products that are shipping worldwide. Sure, I only see a few drives each year. Most are the cheapest thing you can buy at the local computer store so my sample size is not very valid either. As someone else said here: If you are looking at the first few thousand of a product then don't be surprised if they support firmware upgrade while for the rest of the product life that feature does not exist. Except when selling product to a company like yours that wants features that may never be used, there is no need to continue support for a feature that will never be used. Firmware updating is a real good example of this - once the firmware is "debugged" enough to run most of the time with Windows the firmware flash chip can be replaced with a ROM chip on the next 10 million drives! Hale *** Hale Landis *** www.ata-atapi.com ***
