ATA was originally designed for, and worked only with, hard disks and devices that could emulate them. The
Small Form Factor Committee (SFF) introduced ATAPI to be used for a variety of other devices that require functions beyond those necessary for hard disks. For example, any removable media device needs a "media eject" command, and a way for the host to determine whether the media is present, and these were not provided in the ATA protocol. The Small Form Factor committee approached this problem by defining ATAPI as part of the fourth generation of ATA. ATAPI carries SCSI commands through ATA, so ATAPI devices are "speaking SCSI" other than at the electrical interface. In fact, some early ATAPI devices were simply SCSI devices with an ATA/ATAPI to SCSI protocol converter added on. The SCSI commands and responses are embedded in "packets" (hence "ATA Packet Interface") for transmission on the ATA cable. This interfaces ATA with any device class for which a SCSI command set has been defined. ATAPI devices are also "speaking ATA" because the ATA physical interface and protocol are still being used to send the packets. The
Direct Memory Access feature for the ATA interface was introduced along with ATAPI. == Specification ==