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* From the T10 Reflector ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), posted by: * "Nathan Obr" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * Pat, you are off topic. I am looking for a SAS specific scenario. USB and whatever you consider 'soft bridges' is not of concern here. Nathan -----Original Message----- From: Pat LaVarre [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, April 16, 2004 4:07 PM To: Nathan Obr Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [t13] FYI: T10 news: SCSI to ATA Translation Study Groupmeetin g Nathan O: > As far as I can tell all of the translation is very modular and > should happen transparently to other devices. Yes people sell bridges to IDE by claiming the theory that the bridge is naturally so trivial and transparent it needs no testing. In practice, people actually get the thirteen cases wrong, misaligned address and/or length wrong, additional lengths wrong, x00 meaning x100 wrong, etc. etc. The so-called transparent connection often actually chokes over much of anything beyond read/ write of a few blocks: e.g. zero blocks, beyond x100 blocks, firmware update, rapid disk erase, disk passwords, etc. From time to time people even get more elemental basics like op x12 Inquiry and op x25 Read Capacity wrong, just because some hosts in fact do tolerate trouble there, especially in op x12 Inquiry for zero bytes. Last I checked, Microsoft was still shipping as part of Windows, a soft bridge to ATA that behaved bizarrely in the basic basic test case of letting the cdb[4] Allocation Length of op x12 Inquiry fall out of sync with the expected length of data - the parameter that in USB would become dCBWDataTransferLength. The products that ship with those kinds of errors only work enough less often than everything else to cause a rash of minor incompatibilities. Whether writing more English will help I'm not sure. Contemporaneous as-yet-ineffective efforts include the usb.org msc committee bco (binary-code-only) Compliance suite and the usb.org msc committee English-only redefinition of "bootable" SCSI. Broader distribution of open source compliance test suites would actually help, I think. Binary-code-only can do some good of course. Plugfests designed merely to plug new devices into more than just the latest Windows would help. Just plain plugging into Linux, Mac, Win ME/ 98/ 95 etc. often demoes how unreasonably a device designed for Win XP actually behaves. Pat LaVarre * * For T10 Reflector information, send a message with * 'info t10' (no quotes) in the message body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
