Did you know that there are IDE drives that use SCSI commands for communication? And even more SATA drives that are do so?
While SCSI hardware is not manufactured anymore, the SCSI software protocol is very much alive, with the latest draft from 2025. Especially SATA multimedia drives (everything supprting optical media like CDs, DVDs, BDs or DVD-RAMs) use SCSI commands for communication. There are also some old IDE devices (LS-120 or memory card readers) with SCSI support, so-called ATAPI devices. ATAPI stands for "ATA Packet Interface", which is the standard for using SCSI commands with IDE/SATA devices (Packet Writing).
HDDRIVER and HDDRUTIL support the ATA Packet Interface, and therefore you can use ATAPI or SATA multimedia devices with your Atari. You can, for instance, connect a SATA optical drive, partition a DVD-RW, BD-RE or DVD-RAM medium in it, and then just use it with TOS. By making use of advanced SCSI commands, HDDRUTIL automatically detects which kind of medium is inserted. It offers to partition a DVD-RAM, but when a CD-ROM is present this function is not enabled.
DVD-RAM media are very good media for backups, because they are known to reliably store data for a long time.
Remember to enable "Manage Multimedia Drives" in HDDRUTIL's "Removable Media/Memory Cards" settings if you want to use TOS filesystems on rewritable optical media, e.g. for backups. Also see the manual for details.
Note that IDE/SATA hard drives (which are not multimedia drives), do not natively support SCSI commands. But with HDDRIVER's integrated SCSI Driver you can nevertheless treat them like SCSI drives. HDDRIVER translates all SCSI commands mandatory for hard drives (and some more) into IDE commands. Therefore, if you want to do some low-level device programming, you do not have to bother with the differences between IDE, SATA, ATAPI, SCSI or ACSI. HDDRIVER automatically takes care of everything.