A couple of years back I implemented an MP3 player using an AVR and IDE interface - I controlled the IDE through simple parallel ports. The design didn't even have enough memory to buffer a sector, so it took advantage of the drive buffer, reading the data directly from the drive's buffer as it needed it. Writing (which it could do in download mode) was a bit more interesting... IIRC the drive was quite easy to talk to. Regards, Dave -- dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html