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- IMPORTANT NOTE: HD Tach 2.61 may be incompatible with autoinsert notification
- on some Windows 95/98 systems. This incompatibility will cause a blue screen
- error. If this error occurs you must disable autoinsert to run the test.
- Disable autoinsert by using Control Panel. From Control Panel double click
- System, then Device Manager, then CDROM, then disable autoinsert in the Settings
- of each CDROM drive. You must reboot for this change to take effect. After
- running HD Tach you can enable autoinsert through the same procedure.
-
- HD Tach 2.61
- * Fixed a bug with removable drive (ZIP, Jazz, floppy, LS-120) support.
-
- HD Tach 2.60
- * Added advanced size check (for large drives that are detected as 8gb
- instead of their actual size).
- * Improved efficiency of burst test to detect higher (Ultra66/U2W SCSI)
- burst rates.
-
- HD Tach 2.54
-
- * Fixed a bug that allowed hard drive caches to affect write benchmark
- * New code to calculate drive length and sector size - should work
- better with larger drives and RAID arrays
- * Updated burst speed graph to account for UltraSCSI devices
- (the log file hdtach.log results were always accurate)
-
- HD Tach 2.53
-
- * Workaround for write speed test - drive caches were inflating numbers.
-
- HD Tach 2.52
-
- * Support for floppy drive and LS120 floppy added! Be patient!
- * Windows NT support only available in registered version
- * Write test only available in registered version
-
- HD Tach will show a list of drives in the system. In the unregistered version,
- (Read Only) will be displayed by each drive - the write test is disabled.
- The drive letters (if any) representing each drive will also be displayed
- along with the system ID string for the drive. In the registered version
- (Read/Write) will be displayed next to hard drives that are not partitioned
- and removable media drives. You may only execute the write test on drives
- that display (Read/Write).
-
- REMOVABLE MEDIA DRIVES: (FLOPPY, JAZZ, ZIP, ETC)
- Before loading HD Tach make certain that a formatted disk is loaded and
- initialized in the drive. Registered users: After write testing a removable
- media disk you must format it before testing again.
-
- Access time (in ms) - time to read one random sector from the hard drive.
- Includes seek time, latency, and read one sector.
-
- Burst speed - maximum speed of the computer to hard drive interface. This
- represents the speed of data transferred from the hard drive on-board-cache to
- the system memory.
-
- Speed per zone - The test is performed in 32mb zones. For each zone 1mb is
- read and the result is written to HDTACH.LOG.
-
- Average speed (after test complete) - the speed from each zone averaged.
-
- You can load HDTACH.LOG into a spreadsheet to graph the results. Each 32mb
- block from the hard drive has a value in kilobytes per second. Dips in the
- middle of a graph do not generally mean the hard drive is defective. It is
- more likely that some other component of the computer interfered with the
- test and slowed the results briefly.
-
- For best results, disable network adapters, screen savers, autoinsert
- notification, and any other task that might affect the benchmark. During
- the test do not move the mouse.
-