schuster@dasys1.UUCP (Michael Schuster) (09/12/88)
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A recent discussion on this net centered on two hard disk "maintenance"
programs - SpinRite and Disk Technician Advanced. Both share the unique
feature of testing hard disk performance with ECC disabled - so that
no "soft" errors are left on the drive. Where present, these can be
easily seen as "slow reads" - for instance while watching the cursor
during the surface scan portion of PC Tools "Compress" utility.
A friend has two BIG (240 MB) drives on his bulletin board, partitioned
into huge partitions using SpeedStor. Unfortunately it would seem that
neither DT nor Spinrite recognize these (the latter confirmed by phone
call to Steve Gibson - the present version only works with "DOS compatible"
partitions; i.e. <32 MB).
The question, therefore, is this: is it possible to map out "soft" errors
(like ECC correctable sectors) with any other disk test/maintenance
software? My friend's philosophy is this: he wants the area flagged
bad at the FIRST "burp" or sign of trouble. He doesn't want ECC-correctible
sectors used AT ALL ... with all that disk space he can well afford to have
a few more bad clusters.
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l\ /l' _ Mike Schuster {sun!hoptoad,cmcl2!phri}!dasys1!schuster
l \/ lll/(_ Big Electric Cat schuster@dasys1.UUCP
l lll\(_ New York, NY USA DELPHI,GEnie:MSCHUSTER CIS:70346,1745