So - ATM machines are well proven, reliable, ubiquitous, and they provide a printed receipt.
Lets use them for voting. Everyone gets an account balance of 1 vote.
First off, without a more detailed description of what the user really wants to do, it is very hard to say whether it is doable. If he wants to write say, an isolated 1 in a stream of 0s at a certain physical location on the media, that will not happen on any modern drive. Many responses have pointed that out. If he wants to write a 512 byte block of 'something' at a physical location, that is quite doable. If he wants to write a given frequency pattern to a given spot, that is also doable, but very drive specific. All drives have a manufacturing 'special mode' which allows for physical positioning of the actuator. All drives have commands that allow special patterns to be written.
Modern disk drives are very complex. The amount of effort required to reverse engineer the controller hardware and firmware of a given drive would be huge. I have worked in the disk drive industry for over 20 years. Don't listen to folks that tell you 'Steve Gibson can do it'. He can't.
There are people in San Jose, Colorado, Rochester, etc that do this stuff every day. It is not easy.
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So - ATM machines are well proven, reliable, ubiquitous, and they provide a printed receipt. Lets use them for voting. Everyone gets an account balance of 1 vote.
First off, without a more detailed description of what the user really wants to do, it is very hard to say whether it is doable. If he wants to write say, an isolated 1 in a stream of 0s at a certain physical location on the media, that will not happen on any modern drive. Many responses have pointed that out. If he wants to write a 512 byte block of 'something' at a physical location, that is quite doable. If he wants to write a given frequency pattern to a given spot, that is also doable, but very drive specific. All drives have a manufacturing 'special mode' which allows for physical positioning of the actuator. All drives have commands that allow special patterns to be written. Modern disk drives are very complex. The amount of effort required to reverse engineer the controller hardware and firmware of a given drive would be huge. I have worked in the disk drive industry for over 20 years. Don't listen to folks that tell you 'Steve Gibson can do it'. He can't. There are people in San Jose, Colorado, Rochester, etc that do this stuff every day. It is not easy.