SimpleTech USB HDD driver

[Scott Mitchell]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 08:33:15AM +0200, Devon H. O'Dell wrote:
> Scott Mitchell wrote:
> 
> >This is fine - just an informational message rather than anything
> >actually wrong.
> >
> >
> Out of curiosity, what does that indicate (or where can I find comments 
> in the source)?

As I understand it, the USB mass storage protocol uses SCSI commands, which
is why you end up mounting /dev/da0 to see your drive.  For reasons I'm not
familiar with, there are two flavours of these SCSI commands around - 6 byte
and 10 byte.  I believe the driver always tries to use 6 byte commands first
and falls back to 10 byte if the shorter commands are not supported.  You
used to need a quirk entry for such devices (to force the driver to only use
10 byte commands) but things have improved to the point that quirks are now
only needed for really screwed up devices.

No idea why both 6 byte and 10 byte commands exist.  No doubt someone out
there knows the historical background to it all.
 
> Yes, I also got an email from the product manager of the SimpleDrive 
> asking me what sort of documentation I was looking for. This seems like 
> an open-source friendly company; just so that we can keep this in mind 
> in case there are portable storage device/hard drive issues in the 
> future. It looks like Firewire is also taken care of, but you never know 
> what else there might be in the future.

That's good news.

Cheers,

	Scott