Essential Disk Utilities



I must admit that I was somewhat surprised at the need for such a set of applications on the Series 5. I suppose that like most RISC OS users, I've regarded running disc defragmentation utilities as some strange ritual that DOS or Windows users have to do from time to time as a punishment to remind themselves of the perversity of their computers. As RISC OS handles all of that totally automatically and transparently, the first time I used a PC and discovered that defragmentation tools are required, I was amazed. As Psion machines effectively use the same sort of disc format, I suppose it shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise that defragmentation could happen on a Compact Flash. That it should happen in main memory really astonished me!
Atelier are a French software company, and have produced this package for the Series 5 and the Geofox One. I've tried a pre-release version on both machines, and it works equally well on each one. There's perhaps a slight risk in trying something as sophisticated and potentially dangerous as these utilities on the Geofox One, as it does have a different memory architecture and a slightly different version of the EPOC32 Operating System. As an example, there are several patches that need to be loaded onto the machine if it is ever given a hard reset, as otherwise these differences will become rather obvious. Fortunately, there's no problems of that sort here, as Atelier have worked closely with Geofox to ensure that the package is totally compatible with the Geofox One.

The package comes as a single SIS file, and when run it gives the choice to install as many of the of the four components as you want. These comprise "CheckDisk", "Optimise", "SmartFormat", and "DiskEditor", and I'll look at them in turn.

CheckDisk
This takes up 125 kb of drive space, and does a straightforward job in looking at a "disc" (internal RAM or a Compact Flash) to see if there are any problems on them. If there are, it lets you know if they are serious enough to worry about, or can be ignored. In each case, you can tell it to repair the problem anyway if you like.


CheckDisk in Action

I found it a very reassuring application to use, and when run the first time it found a lost cluster on my Compact Flash and removed it. As you can see from the screen display above, it is very simple to use, with a clear, friendly display. In common with the other applications in the package, it has a minimal Help file, which assumes some familiarity with PC disc tools. The full release version includes a 90 page manual (in three languages), which expands on that information.

Optimize
This is for defragmenting drives, and seems designed to resemble the equivalent applications on desktop machines. If you've sat and waited for Windows to chug through defragmenting a drive, you'll be familiar with watching the little boxes rearrange themselves and fall into place. This version takes up just over 100 kb of space, and runs on either drive. It took over three hours to defragment the internal drive of the Geofox One, so it isn't the sort of thing to decide to do just before you pack in for the night! I'd also strongly recommend running the machine from the mains adaptor while doing any of these disc-intensive operations, especially on a Compact Flash, just in case the battery level drops too low and corrupts the CF device.


Defragmentation in Progress

The screenshot above shows the graphic display while defragmenting the internal RAM drive of the Series 5. The first time I ran it, I was astonished to see that it was apparently 45% fragmented! It took around 90 minutes or so to work its way through the tidying-up process, and I think it has speeded some things up. The Compact Flash is always processed much quicker, taking around 15 minutes. After doing that the Message Suite email application (which I keep on Drive D:) is noticeably quicker in refreshing the screen when deleting some of the plethora of little message files it creates.


The Alternative Display

There is a rather more informative text-based display that can be used, and that shows the full story in numbers of the state my internal drive had got into.

DiskEdit
DiskEdit is a sector editor, and is for use under the supervision of someone who knows what they're doing! It can be used to directly change the contents of discs, and is deeply terrifying in the hands of an inexperienced user without access to the manual (like me!). Fortunately, you get warnings when you launch it, and it defaults to being a disc sector viewer, with the editing capabilities turned off. It occupies around 170 kb of disc space, and is the part of the kit that I would find to be the least useful.


DiskEdit in Action

However, for those made of sterner stuff than I am, it could be a very powerful tool to find and reinstate deleted Data records, etc. Personally, I'd take advantage of the modular nature of the package and remove it so I wouldn't be tempted to play!

SmartFormat
This seems like the most important part of the whole package if you own a Compact Flash. It takes up a miserly 60 kb of disc space, and allows you to reformat a disc to a non-standard cluster size. Psion have fixed the cluster size for Compact Flash devices at 4kb, whilst the internal drive uses 512 byte clusters. That means that a small file of, say, 250 bytes, will occupy 512 bytes on the internal drive, and 4 kb on the Flash. Likewise a 5 kb file will take up 5 kb on the internal drive, but 8 kb on the Flash device. Consequently, my 15 Mb CF has actually only held around 11·5 Mb of data, mainly thanks to all those small Message Suite files.


SmartFormat Choices

Running SmartFormat lets you choose how the CF should be formatted, and I opted for Atelier's suggested default of 2 kb per cluster. You can pick other values, and the "minimise wasted space" one looks very interesting. Being a little more conservative, I decided to save that for a future experiment, backed up my CF, and reformatted it. Naturally, it is rather important to have SmartFormat installed on the internal drive for this to work, and the application refuses to let you go further if you've been foolish enough to install it on the device you're trying to format (yes, I did try it out!). The reformat progressed very rapidly, and after I'd restored the contents of the CF (around an hour later!), I discovered that I'd gained another 1·3 Mb of free space on that drive - well worth having! One slight annoyance is that after the format (and before restoring everything), I used CheckDisk only to be told that there was a lost cluster. This was a repeatable problem, and will hopefully be solved for the full release version.

Conclusions
These look a very well worthwhile collection of utilities. My order of importance would be:

  1. SmartFormat
  2. CheckDisk
  3. Optimize
  4. DiskEdit

but others will have their own priorities. The price of the package is £39·95 inc. VAT in the UK. That seems a bit expensive to me: if it were closer to £30, I'd regard them as truly "Essential Disk Utilities".


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