Patent ID: 6895455

Claim:
A disk drive connectable to a host computer, and responsive to standard disk-drive commands associated with disk-drive operations and to nonstandard disk-drive commands required for disk manufacture and quality testing, the disk drive comprising; a disk; a head actuated radially over the disk; a disk control system for responding to the standard and nonstandard disk-drive commands and for accessing data storage locations on the disk through the head, wherein the standard disk drive commands include a Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) write-log command; a serial ATA interface for coupling the disk control system to the host computer when the disk drive is connected to the host computer, wherein the serial ATA interface is configured to transfer standard disk-drive commands from the host computer to the disk control system and is configured to not transfer non-standard disk-drive commands from the host computer to the disk control system; and means for extracting a nonstandard disk-drive command that is embedded within a data block accessed using a SMART write-log command, and providing the extracted nonstandard disk-drive command to the disk control system.