LBA level disk access

Question

What's the best way to issue disk commands (read k blocks from lba n etc.) to a SATA disk? The choice of OS does not matter. I also need to be able to issue ATA commands. I would rather do this through a tool/application than use ioctls programmatically.

Answer 1

On Linux, http://tldp.org/HOWTO/SCSI-Generic-HOWTO/ is exactly what you're going for - you can control the drive 100% from user mode, just like you would have to in kernel mode. SATA drives register as SCSI on Linux these days (and modern ATA commands are intentionally similar to SCSI commands)