In the beginning it was *interesting* working with
different vendor
implementations of ATA. For example, Maxtor, initially swapped the
order of the words in the "total number of sectors" field in the
IDENTIFY command return.
I remember back when 386's were over our "capital expense" limit ($1000) at
work, we would piece together 386's for the engineers to get them the best
machines. We were buying Conner 80MB drives at the time, so we built this guy
a machine with a Conner-80MB in it, and a few months later he was running low
on space and wanted another drive, so we bought *another* (same model)
Conner-80MB.
No matter what I tried, they would not work together either way around as
master/slave. Looking at the model#, one was "rev-A" and one was
"rev-B". We
wound up throwing a Maxtor 80MB in with it - with *either* Conner drive and
a Maxtor, it worked fine. Found it quite humorous that two drives from the
same manufacturer wouldn't work together, but both worked fine with a
competitors drive.
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