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Spoon et al,
As we're all aware, Microsoft's ATA driver has a built in feature to step down the interface speed to ATA/IDE-attached drives moving from the normal speed (usually one of the fastest UDMA speeds, down through slower DMA approaches, down into the slowest PIO approach). The original purpose of this feature was to work around issues with poorly made or out of spec ATA cables that were plaguing PC hardware. An unfortunate side effect is that scratched or otherwise hard to read optical discs give off very similar symptoms from the driver's point of view.
In addition, as discussions here and elsewhere have shown, alternate connection strategies (USB, firewire and even in some cases SATA) often lead to a situation where software cannot properly use drive features such as C2 detection/flags, cache detection and/or cache bypass when supported.
So, some are determined to solider on using ATA connections.
My question is: what are the best practices for doing so while also reducing the amount of times one must reset the ATA driver after dealing with problem discs (via uninstall+reinstall+reboot or via registry-changes+reboot)? Dealing with the problem on a single drive system is a nuisance, but dealing with the problem on a multi-drive and/or robotic system is a big workflow problem.
-brendan
As we're all aware, Microsoft's ATA driver has a built in feature to step down the interface speed to ATA/IDE-attached drives moving from the normal speed (usually one of the fastest UDMA speeds, down through slower DMA approaches, down into the slowest PIO approach). The original purpose of this feature was to work around issues with poorly made or out of spec ATA cables that were plaguing PC hardware. An unfortunate side effect is that scratched or otherwise hard to read optical discs give off very similar symptoms from the driver's point of view.
In addition, as discussions here and elsewhere have shown, alternate connection strategies (USB, firewire and even in some cases SATA) often lead to a situation where software cannot properly use drive features such as C2 detection/flags, cache detection and/or cache bypass when supported.
So, some are determined to solider on using ATA connections.
My question is: what are the best practices for doing so while also reducing the amount of times one must reset the ATA driver after dealing with problem discs (via uninstall+reinstall+reboot or via registry-changes+reboot)? Dealing with the problem on a single drive system is a nuisance, but dealing with the problem on a multi-drive and/or robotic system is a big workflow problem.
-brendan
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