Hi,

As per the topic, what ATA commands do they translate to? Would a write be translated to WRITE SECTOR, WRITE DMA or WRITE BUFFER or the EXT versions of these commands?

There is no absolute answer to this, since read()s and write()s are a couple of layers removed from the low-level hardware access. Also, it would depend on the filesystem type, since the organization of data on the media (not necessarily an ATA disk) depends on the the filesystem type. The driver for the media would determine the ATA commands employed. You should be able to determine this by looking at the kernel driver source code for the hardware type you use. It may be possible to access the media from user-space using the low-level semantics of the driver, however this would be most unconventional. Applications such as dd operate at the filesystem level, and do not know about the underlying hardware.

--- rod.