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REVIEW.DOC
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1989-01-18
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Disk Technician Advanced
a review By Mike Focke
15 January 1989
I wrote an earlier (June 1988 CPCUG Monitor, SPINRITE.ARC on
a Bulletin Board) review of SpinRite(tm), a product that
tests your hard disk, refreshes the address markings and data
on your hard disk and optimizes the placement of sectors on
your drive. When I saw an ad for a new version of Disk
Technician Advanced(tm), a similar product, I thought it
would be interesting to do a comparison.
Disk Technician Advanced is one of three versions of Disk
Technician marketed by Prime Solutions Incorporated. Over
150,000 copies of various versions of Disk Technician have
been sold. Version 3 Revision 5.22 was tested.
1. Disk Technician is copy protected, works with up to two
physical MFM drives of up to 32 megabytes and lists for
$99.95. It allows you to run tests on your hard drives
and floppies and to repair any repairable sectors found to
need repair. Destructive low-level formatting is provided
for all machine types. Only AT type machines will allow
use of the non-destructive formatting capability, not PC,
XT or PS/2 types.
2. Disk Technician+ is copy protected and works with large
capacity drives as well as both MFM and RLL controllers.
It lists for $129.95
3. Disk Technician Advanced (hereafter "DTA") is not copy
protected and provides additional features including non-
destructive formatting on all machine types (except PS/2
types with translating controllers) and interleave
optimization. DTA lists for $189.95 and can be found
below $100.
To run DTA, you copy the DTA floppy to a disk with DOS
installed. You reboot your system from that newly created
floppy to insure that no TSRs, FastOpens, or caches are in
use. You are then asked to run an initial monthly run which
allows DTA to establish a data base with information on any
errors discovered. Non-destructive low-level reformatting is
done if sector interleave optimization is found necessary on
this initial monthly run.
Once the data base has been established, Daily, Weekly and
Monthly runs are provided to maintain the data base and to
allow the "Artificial Intelligence" of this version of Disk
Technician to determine:
If there is significant deterioration of the drive or
controller such that you should be warned of the
probability of future problems.
If a particular "Soft 1" read/write error (one that could
be corrected by the controller without DOS ever seeing an
error) is happening so frequently that the cluster in
which the sector occurs should be marked as "bad" and
your precious data moved to a safer place.
TESTS
DTA run against a previously interleave-optimized Seagate
ST225 20 megabyte drive took:
Monthly Run - 3 hours and 41 minutes
Weekly Run - 1 hour and 23 minutes
Daily Run - 4 minutes
After the initial run of both SpinRite and DTA, I created a
"bad" spot on the ST225 by over-tightening the bolts that
attach the side of the drive to the computer's case and doing
a single sector write. This over-tightening is known to
cause a distortion in the drive's case, so the heads will
write data slightly askew as a result. After I wrote the
"bad" data, I relaxed the bolts' tension so that the heads
would now align correctly but the data would still be "off
center".
Both SpinRite and DTA detected this sector as "bad" and both
choose to restore it to use after reformatting the track and
rewriting the "off center" data. On runs after the initial
one, DTA would reassuringly report that it was monitoring
that previously "bad" spot on the disk.
DTA uses a cluster of your drive, which it marks off as "bad"
in the FAT so it can not be erased, to store a safety
identification number. It can then be sure that the data base
it is using and the drive it is reading match. Despite DTA
showing that none of the clusters on the drive are "bad", you
will have a cluster that other utilities will show as "marked
bad".
A NEC 20 megabyte drive had never shown any "bad" spots and
neither SpinRite nor DTA detected any "bad" spots despite
repeated runs.
The true test is not one where the drive is already known
to be good, I needed a drive with some marginal sectors to
test. Larry Babcock (A-Quality Personal Computers in Vienna,
VA) volunteered 6 known bad hard drives that had been removed
from computers when customers upgraded. One, a Tulin TL226
20 megabyte drive, was just what I was looking for, a working
drive with some "bad" spots marked on the case. I used the
Western Digital Controller's BIOS logic via DOS's DEBUG to
low-level format the Tulin and marked off only one of the two
tracks marked "bad" on the case. I used DOS's FDISK to
partition the drive and DOS's FORMAT to high-level format the
drive. I knew that DOS's FORMAT program would catch some of
the "bad" spots in the remaining "bad" track and mark those
clusters as "bad" in the File Allocation Table (FAT). Once I
had done this, I had a drive with examples of the two ways
that sectors can be marked "bad". There were 30,720 unusable
bytes in 15 "bad" clusters of 4 sectors of 512 bytes each, a
track containing 17 sectors and 8704 bytes was marked "bad
track" and the rest of the sectors on the disk were good
according to DOS's FORMAT command.
I ran SpinRite's Extremely Thorough Pattern Testing mode, the
one which tests each sector 84 times. SpinRite reacted to a
series of consecutive "bad" sectors by issuing a message that
might have convinced a novice that there was something
so seriously wrong with the drive that it should be replaced.
There wasn't, and I allowed SpinRite to continue. SpinRite's
testing allowed it to return 11 clusters to use. SpinRite
found /nD the drive that it should be replaced.
There wasn't,unusable
bytes in 15 "bad" clusters of 4 sectors of 512Inusable
bytes in 15 "bad" clusters of 4 sectors of 512I ╦ 1on all machine types (except PS/2 TESTS
would reassuringly report emely kIg is
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