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On Thu, 17 May 2001 01:17:22 pdt, Dal Allan wrote:
>Let me correct some misstatements about the SFF Committee.
Yes, SFF has done and continues to do many good things for the
industry. My problem is not with SFF but with the editors of the
SFF-8020 document nearly 8 years ago. I sent many messages to those
gentlemen pointing out errors and inconsistencies in SFF-8020. I
never received a reply to any of those messages and those problems in
SFF-8020 were never fixed. The result is that T13 is still today
dealing with those problems (signature issues, byte count issues and
the true meaning of IO and CD). These are all ATA/ATAPI transport
layer issues and are clearly now T13's problem. I have never tried to
examine the differences between the CD command set describes by
SFF-8020 and T10 MMC so you don't see me saying much of anything
about all those problems (But I understand Tony Goodfellow has a huge
document on this subject).
>>[HL said] The problem with all the SFF documents is that they mostly have been
>> develop completely outside of the T10 or T13 community.
>Rubbish. Until T13 decided to absorb all the SFF specifications which
>involved ATA, the attendance at SFF Committee meetings listed the same
>engineers as regularly attended T13 and T10.
I was refering to the SFF-80xx documents that were developed with
little or no input from the members of the ATA hard disk drive
community (except perhaps one company that was very actively trying
to making everyone think they solely invented the IDE interface and
solely controlled its future).
>>[HL said]the SFF documents are out-of-phase with the T10 and T13 activities.
>SFF specifications were never 'out of phase' at the time they were developed
>because SFF projects were developed with the tacit support of T10 and T13.
I was refering to only the SFF-80xx documents. I clearly remember
that none of the hard disk drive vendors (other than the one I
refered to above) was invited to any of early ATAPI meeting (maybe
that was prior to ATAPI becoming an SFF activity?).
>Don't be ridiculous. Hundreds of companies rely on SFF specifications as the
>only source of information on high speed signaling, connectors, enclosure
>interfaces, disk form factors, etc.
I agree and SFF provides a valuable service in this area.
>The last revision of SFF-8020 was January 1996, so there has been plenty of
>time to put that content into a standard. Don't blame SFF as the source of
>ATAPI's woes, look to the failure of the standards process to provide
>everything that developers need to know.
And I think everything in SFF-8020 is in ATA/ATAPI-4 and in MMC. The
problem is those things in SFF-8020 that were incorrect or misleading
that T13 and T10 have tried to fix in ATA/ATAPI-x and MMC-x.
*** Hale Landis *** [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***
*** Niwot, CO USA *** www.ata-atapi.com ***
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