Minutes of Aug

e06155r0 Minutes of Free Fall Ad Hoc Meeting Aug 17, 2006

Minutes of Aug.17 2006 T13 Ad Hoc meeting on Free Fall Features

Host Joseph Chen (Samsung) Attendees Dan Colegrove (HGST) Jim Hatfield (Seagate) Fred Zayas (Toshiba) Tom McGoldrick (Toshiba) Mine Dudiman (Toshiba) (I hope I got the spelling right) Leonard Russo (HP) Wayne Bellamy (HP) Frank Shu (Microsoft) Minutes taken by Jim Hatfield

This was a teleconference/webex on Thursday August 17, 2006 at 2pm PDT to discuss the two proposals dealing with Free Fall detection and behaviour.

Please let me (Jim Hatfield) know if these meeting minutes are inaccurate. I’ve not had much practice with taking minutes.

Discussion about Samsung’s proposal (e06144r3): 1) Command timeout a. At the previous ad hoc meeting, it was concluded that holding BSY during the free fall event was not a desireable way to behave. Instead, the device should abort the command if the command did not complete within a ‘timeout’ period. The timeout period proposed was that specified by the SCT ‘Error Control’ feature. b. Jim mentioned that this SCT timer is only specified to be applicable to read and write commands. What about things like SMART ? SCT ‘write same’ ? and many more ? The response was that the description in SCT would need to be changed by this proposal. c. The group went off-topic when we started discussing OS stragegies for dealing with command timeouts. Frank indicated that there are valid reasons for the OS to behave as it does. He also indicated that he perceives a need for the device to inform the host of the event. He suggested using PRCS. This went on for a long time. Perhaps this will result in a future proposal to T13 or to OS vendors. Dan brought us back to the topic.

Discussion about Toshiba’s proposal (e06154r0): 1) A summary was given of the proposal and the rationale behind it. 2) Fred mentioned that Toshiba wants to also add a ‘simulate’ parameter to be used in testing the feature and the host interactionwithout actually dropping the device. 3) Sensitivity

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a. Dan said he wanted to discuss the ‘sensitivity’ parameter. b. Fred mentioned that DCO may be used to set a default power-on sensitivity value. c. Several people asked the question of how to objectively define ‘sensitivity’ in a standard way so that any host could know what value to set the device’s G-sensor sensitivity to. It was generally agreed that there is probably no easy way to specify this. Fred indicated that the meaning of individual sensitivity settings would be vendor-specific. d. Fred argued that the sensitivity setting is not a new feature, but actually a replacement for an existing feature that currently exists on Toshiba and Lenovo hosts. (Note: no Lenovo representative was present at this meeting.) He argued that moving the sensor to the device means having equivalent functionality – just in a different place, and therefore, that the device must have a sensitivity setting. He indicated that user applications are routinely available for the end user to make adjustments. e. Jim and Joseph argued that their customers want only an ON and OFF setting, or a ‘lid open’/’lid closed’ setting, without allowing the user to make adjustments. Someone else said that this kind of information should not be allowed in this debate about what is right and what is wrong. f. Dan opened another can of worms when he recalled some history of another feature (AAM or APM ?) where customers routinely put in arbitrary ‘limit’ capabilities for the feature, and each kept changing what was reported. How does this apply to Free Fall settings ? He suggested that vendors would indicate ‘I can survive a fall with setting=X’ and this would lead to ‘wars of words’ “mines better than yours” without any possibility of objective validation. g. Joseph indicated that Samsung is open to considering a ‘sensitivity’ option as long as the need for it is proven to him. h. Fred indicated that Toshiba is willing to compromise on i. Define the position of the fields in a standard way, but ii. Allow the uses of the fields to be vendor-specific.

Action Items: 1) Dan will make sure that sufficient time is reserved on the agenda for the August T13 meeting.

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