I had a closer look at the Purple technical manual. Section 4.0 lists those ATA-8 commands that are supported by the drive. It makes reference to the “D1699 ATA8-ACS specification”.
AT Attachment 8 - ATA/ATAPI Command Set (ATA8-ACS) - T13:
http://www.t13.org/documents/uploadeddocuments/docs2008/d1699r6a-ata8-acs.pdf
Section 4.23 of the ATA spec states …
Devices that implement the Streaming feature set shall implement the GPL feature set and the following commands:
a) CONFIGURE STREAM
b) READ STREAM EXT
c) WRITE STREAM EXT
d) READ STREAM DMA EXT
e) WRITE STREAM DMA EXT
Unfortunately the Purple manual makes no reference to these commands. So what gives? Is this yet another error in the docs, or does “AllFrame” refer to something else?
To answer this question, I thought that perhaps I would follow up the patent numbers on the drive’s label:
http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US5956196.pdf
http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US6178056.pdf
http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US6263459.pdf
http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US6289484.pdf
However, the most recent of these patents is dated Sept 11, 2001, and none discusses streaming.
This begs the question, where are the other patents that relate to WD’s technological innovations of the past 13 years, and why aren’t these recorded on the label?
