>ATA is not a wise choice for disk storage - it doesn't scale well, and is really suited to internal installation. I'm not surprised to see that it's being dinked to deliver performance - a lot of people were betting that ATA would be replaced by IEEE 1394 and USB, and when that fizzled, it got really important that the basic drive in typical systems perform well, so my unproven and very speculative feeling is that the ATAPI miniport tries to enable any features in the drive that might offer better performance with what users likely will have in place. If the big PC vendors who're putting Win2K Pro on their laptops and business desktop models end up performing poorly, guess what won't get sold?

Hmm... reliability is more important than performance. There are cases where non-technical concerns override engineering (think Challenger), but in this case I'd bet not.

Competition in hard drive manufacturing is brutal, and the drives themselves are commodity items. Makers can't afford to "differentiate" themselves based on poor reliability. All surviving drive manufacturers have extraordinary QC programs in place.

As for the OS side of things, MS is making a concerted push into the "big iron" / "mission critical" / "enterprise ready" territory with W2K. They can hardly afford to let a problem with a fairly fundamental I/O driver fester.

Have you submitted your findings to MS as a bug? You've got the system/hardware chops that they'd probably listen to you... :-)

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>>Question for you: In your testing, were you using machines that not only shut down, but powered off under OS control when shutdown was "complete"? These days, some ATA drives have buffers of 2MB or more, and I'm wondering if the drive is getting powered off before it can fully write its local buffer contents out to disk.
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>I don't think that's the problem.

Just curious - why not?