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Greetings Matthias Fuegger, I don't make HDD's, but I've never seen a drive that does both ATA and ATAPI. Implementation of both interfaces is prohibited in the ATA/ATAPI spec, and just read each ATA command under the "Feature Set" heading for each command. ATA guys have for a long time shunned ATAPI (for various reasons that I'm not going to get into, however there's lots of folks that can chime in on this topic), and ATAPI has long been the tromping grounds for removable media devices such as Zip, LS120, CD-xxx, DVD-xxx, Tape and Atapi-MO. The only magnetic media device I know of is the Zip drive, and because it's a removable media device it's been designed as an ATAPI device. Iomega once had an ATA-Zip drive, but that fell to the wayside for various reasons. (Note to the Fujitsu Atapi-MO folks, please forgive me if I've mis-characterized the MO drive as not being a magnetic media drive since I'm not quite sure how to categorize it) So basically if you want to write to a classical HDD you use the ATA command set as described in the ATA/ATAPI specification. The actual ATAPI commands are written in a myriad of specs from other locations, including (the old ones) SFF8020, SFF8070, SFF8090, and more. Question to the T13 community: The spec has the text "Use prohibited for devices implementing the PACKET feature set" which prohibits ATAPI devices from supporting ATA commands, however why is it against the rules to build a drive that has an ATAPI signature and responds to both ATA and ATAPI identify, as well as ATA and ATAPI commands? MKE. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Matthias F�gger Sent: Monday, October 27, 2003 12:01 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [t13] specification of PACKET opcodes This message is from the T13 list server. Dear all, Is there a PACKET command opcode for a harddisk implementing the PACKET command feature set, which allows me to write to the disk (e.g. sector by sector) similar to the WRITE SECTOR(S) command for older devices? If yes, where is it specified (I could only get information on the PACKET command in general, but not on the PACKET command opcodes from the current ATA/ATAPI 6 specification)? If not, how do I write data to a harddisk implementing ATA/ ATAPI 6? Thank you in advance! Yours sincerely, Matthias Fuegger
