serial ata controller driver alienware area 51

Drivers for current ATA/ATAPI technologies, such as Serial ATA (SATA), should use the higher performance Storport miniport interface. Therefore, if you have already written a SCSI miniport driver, you should be able to easily learn how to write an ATA miniport driver. The ATA miniport driver interface closely resembles the SCSI port driver interface. Therefore, ATA miniport drivers do not have to respond directly to requests from higher-level drivers for SCSI sense data. For example, the ATA port driver uses ATA commands to collect the equivalent of SCSI sense data from the ATA miniport driver, translates the data so that it complies with a SCSI sense data format, and passes the data to higher-level drivers as if it were SCSI sense data. IRBs are better designed than SRBs to the characteristics of ATA devices.Īnother difference between the ATA port driver and other system-supplied storage drivers is that the ATA port driver shields ATA miniport drivers from certain requirements that are defined by the SCSI standard. To communicate with its miniport drivers, ATA port uses a packet called an IDE request block (IRB), which is defined by the IDE_REQUEST_BLOCK structure. The ATA port driver uses SRBs to communicate with higher-level drivers only. All other system-supplied storage port drivers use SCSI request blocks (SRBs) to communicate both with higher-level drivers, such as storage class drivers, and with miniport drivers. The most significant difference between the ATA port driver and other system-supplied storage port drivers is the protocol that the ATA port driver uses to communicate with other drivers. In addition to the SCSI Port Driver and the Storport Driver, Windows Vista and later versions of the Windows operating system provide the ATA port driver ( Ataport.sys), a storage port driver that is especially suitable for use with IDE controllers. Instead, we recommend using the Storport driver and Storport miniport driver models. The ATA port driver and ATA miniport driver models may be altered or unavailable in the future.

Serial ata controller driver alienware area 51