On Fri, 12 Aug 2011, Robert Heller wrote:
The disk's *firmware* updated itself. So long as the *disk* is powered up and spinning, its *firmware* is 'running' (or runs when the disk is accessed or something like that). Modern disks are a long, long way from the simple MFM drives of the 1970s (which presented little more than a buffered interface to the drive mechanism and read/write heads to the host controller -- eg little more than a simple floppy disk drive) -- modern disks have actual embedded micro-processors on them doing various stuff, including monitoring and logging things like sector errors, drive temp., and so on.
So does accessing some of the smart data cause any disk i/o at all, or is this all done from directly firmware?
Kind Regards,
Keith Roberts
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