Annual Report for: [TC T13]

Covering the Period from [6/16/2006] to [6/15/2007 ]

Title of INCITS Subgroup: ATA Storage Interface

Links:

o        http:\\www.t13.org

o        Executive summary

o        Link to Subgroup's area on the Secretariat's Projects Database

o        Significant accomplishments

o        Significant challenges

o        Expected challenges

o        Previous year's meetings

o        Next year's meetings

o        Liaison activities

o        Membership and Officers

o        Future Trends

o        Other administrative information

Informal Description of Work:

Technical Committee T13 is responsible for all interface standards relating to the popular AT Attachment (ATA) storage interface utilized as the hard disk drive, CD, and DVD interface on most personal and mobile computers, personal audio players and personal video recorders today.

1. Executive Summary

At the moment, T13 is responsible for eight published standards, three published technical reports, two draft technical reports and six draft standards in development. Two new projects (amendments) were initiated, and one published standard  was withdrawn during the reporting period.

 

T13 began the reporting period with 21 voting principal members and ended with 21 voting principal members.

 

Because the ATA interface is contained totally within the host computer enclosure and does not provide an external interface, Technical Committee T13 did not previously participate in the international standards process. T13 is pursuing international standardization for INCITS 397:2005 AT Attachment with Packet Interface – 7.

 

2. Significant Accomplishments

T13 continued work on the ATA8 series of standards projects. The ATA8 Projects are:

·        ATA8-AAM ATA Architecture Model (project 1700D)

·        ATA8-ACS ATA Command Set (project 1699D)

·        ATA8-APT ATA Parallel Transport (project 1698D)

·        ATA8-AST ATA Serial Transport (project  1697D)

We found volunteer hosts for our three day meetings during the reporting period. T13 would like to thank Fujitsu Corp., Hitachi GST Corp., nVidia Corp.,  Seagate Corp., ST Microelectronics, and WD Corp. for hosting T13 meetings. T13 has volunteer hosts for the upcoming year.

3. Significant Challenges

 

Multiple working groups and trade associations have been formed to develop extensions or adaptations of ATA disk drive interface standard that is the core product of the T13 TC. These organizations include the Serial ATA International Organization, the Compact Flash Association, the CE-ATA organization, the Trusted Computing Group and others. The liaison activity is significant part of T13 activity. T13 is attempting to co-ordinate the activities of these groups to prevent conflicting use of command, codes and identification information.

The liaison activities have resulted in two areas of concern, copyright issues and confidentiality issues. The SATA-IO organization requested that INCITS license the copyrighted material developed by SATA-IO that is to be included in the ATA8 projects. The negotiations will have to be repeated for ATA8 follow on projects as SATA-IO only licensed their work for specific projects. Several organizations involved in liaison activities have non-disclosure agreements that cover their discussions. This causes a great deal of confusion over the handling of new proposals and features that are discussed both at T13 and at other organizations.

4. Expected Challenges

T13 developed standards contain reserved fields, functions, and codes. Disk drive developers may elect to sometimes use these resources without first obtaining permission from T13. This results in an installed base of non-standard products. T13 will continue to warn members and others that using reserved fields exposes developers to future re-definition.

 

The time lag between new feature proposals and standard project completionapproval leads to implementations based on draft standards. T13 will endeavor to reduce the cycle time of new standard development.

 

5. Committee Activities

a. Previous Year's Meetings:

Meeting Number	Date	Location
60	August, 22-25, 2006	Seattle, WA
61	October 24-27, 2006	San Jose, CA
62	December 12-15, 2006	Las Vegas, NV
63	February 20-23, 2007	Orange County, CA
64	April 24-271, 2007	Longmont, CO
65	June 19-22, 2007	San Jose, CA

b. Next Year's Planned Meetings:

Meeting Number	Date	Location
66	August 21-24, 2007	Longmont, CO
67	October 23-26, 2007	Ft Myers, FL
68	December 11-14, 2007	Redmond, WA
69	February 19-22, 2008	Orange County, CA
70	April 22-25, 2008	Las Vegas, NV
71	June 24-27, 2008	Longmont, CO

 

6. Liaison Activities

INCITS TC T10

There are three primary liaison missions with T10.

·        The SAS standard contains a SATA Tunneling Protocol, or STP, which allows SATA protocol, as described in T13’s ATA/ATAPI-7 standard, to pass through the SAS network. Changes to SATA may impact STP.

·        T10 is also developing a SCSI to ATA translation standard to facilitate storage systems which appear to be SCSI at a higher level but which use SATA drives. SCSI to ATA translation depends on ATA drive functions so T13 needs to be aware of the SCSI to ATA work.

·        The commands transferred to optical media drives, such as DVD’s, use the ATAPI protocol defined by T13 and the MMC command set developed in T10.

Compact Flash Association (CFA)

The Compact Flash form factor devices use the ATA command set. T13 works with CFA when new features and functions require standards changes. CFA refers to down level ATA standards so T13 will encourage CFA to migrate to later ATA standards. A group of ATA Identification data fields and op-codes are labeled Reserved for CFA in ATA standards to prevent duplicate assignment. There is ongoing liaison work to return some of these fields to T13 control.

IDEMA (International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association)

T13 is working with IDMEA on longer physical sector issues and consumer electronics issues.

SATA-IO (Serial ATA International Organization)

T13 has established a formal liaison procedure with the SATA-IO. Please see clause 4.

Trusted Computing Group (TCG)

T13 has allocated command codes for the TCG trusted send and receive commands. These commands will allow a host system to assure the communication path to disk drives is secure. T13 is working with TCG and T10 to insure a high degree of compatibility between T13 and T10 security protocols.

SFF (Small Form Factor)

SFF develops specifications for drive form factors and connectors. Once incorporated in T13 documents SFF makes their specifications obsolete and refer to T13 standards.

MMCA (Multi Media Card Association)

There has been no MMCA liaison activity in the report period.

CE-ATA

CE-ATA is an organization that produced a specification for transport of ATA type commands over a flash memory type parallel bus. T13 has not formed a liaison relationship with CE-ATA. T13 will continue to attempt to forward misdirected inquires to the correct organization.

7. Membership and Officers

a. Officers:

Position (and training date)	Name and organization represented
Chair (07/06)	Daniel Colegrove, Hitachi GST Inc.
Vice Chair	James Hatfield, Seagate Corp.
Secretary	Mark Overby, nVidia Corp.
International Representative	none
Vocabulary Representative	none

All officers have served for the full reporting period

b. Membership:

The INCITS database was checked on 5/22/07.  See attached membership list.

8. Future Trends and Related Technical Activities

The majority of hard disk drive manufacturers are members of T13. T13 also has members from chipset, system, and interface electronics manufacturers. Unfortunately, representation from ATAPI products developers (optical disk and tape drive) is infrequent, but this is compensated for somewhat by our liaison work with the T10 Mulimedia Commands Set and SSC working groups.

The ATA disk drive interface is used on more than 90% of all hard disk and optical disk drives. Because of its popularity it has been used in the Compact Flash Association form factor flash and disk drives. It is likely that the predominant hard disk drive interface will continue to be the ATA interface over the next 3-5 years. There will be incremental improvements such as faster speeds. The ATA interface is being used in consumer electronics devices in addition to computers. This will increase the need for new feature standardization.

Serial ATA has enabled the use of ATA drives in large scale arrays. This will result in new features to support RAID arrays. The SAS interface developed by T10 allows both SATA and SAS disk drives to be supported in the same disk drive enclosure. As a result, T10 and T13 will have to maintain a close liaison.

T13 plans follow on projects to the ATA8 projects now being developed. The parallel ATA transport is stable, while the ATA command set continues to grow to meet new needs. The rate of new command set projects may increase, reducing the time lag from proposal to approval, while the parallel ATA standard may not be revised again.

9. Other Administrative Information

T13 does not collect or disburse funds.