bob@acornrc.UUCP (Bob Weissman) (08/30/88)
I broke down and sent in the $59 for SpinRite.
Executive Summary: it works and is worth the price.
Quick Numbers: disk throughput improved 400%.
The Good News:
SpinRite, simply by telling me that the optimum interleave for my
Seagate ST-238R with the Western Digital 27X controller was 5:1 rather
than the controller's default 4:1, improved the disk's throughput by a
factor of five. That is, I was previously getting about 30kbps, and am
now getting about 150kbps transferred.
[Take this as free advice if you happen to have this combination also.
I wish the salesman had told me to format initially with an interleave
of 5:1 -- it would have saved me having to use SpinRite.]
I also had no trouble telling SpinRite to leave previously marked bad
sectors alone. Somebody worried about this in a previous posting.
True, it's not the default, but it's trivial to do.
My impression is that SpinRite knows more about hard disks than the
Norton Utilities do. (Remember back in the old days, Norton was
written for floppies, then upgraded to work with Winchesters also.
But Norton is still worth it for its undelete and format recover
functions.)
SpinRite arrived within one week of being mail-ordered. Not bad.
The Bad News:
Unfortunately, it was necessary to wipe my disk in order to get this
improvement. Doing a normal, destructive low-level format with the new
interleave would have worked as well.
Turns out the WD 27X controllers have jumpers which make them
masquerade as MFM rather than show their true RLL colors. Using
SpinRite mandated removal of those jumpers, hence the disk had to get
backed up first, jumpers removed from controller, reformatted, and
restored, just as it would when using the built-in low-level format.
[By sheer coincidence, I was planning to do a full backup anyway, so
this didn't bother me that much.]
SpinRite is excrutiatingly slow when doing its most extensive disk
testing. Took about 14 hours on my system. I let it run overnight.
It didn't find any bad spots I didn't already know about. Don't think
I'll run it again at this level for a while!
Caveat Emptor:
Other drive/controller combinations will not have this problem. Still
others are not usable at all with SpinRite. You get a list packed
along with the product. I am glad my combination worked. (In fact,
there's a whole section on the WD 27X controllers and what to do to
make them work with SpinRite.) The product has a 30-day warranty, so
if you get it and find it doesn't work with your disk/controller, just
send it back. Better yet, give Gibson Research a call and ask. I
posted their address and phone number in an earlier posting to
comp.sys.ibm.pc (sorry, don't have it handy now).
The documentation is as full of hype as the advertisements (I know,
it's hard to believe), but all the information you need is there.
(Kind of like Peter Norton, only worse.)
Disclaimer:
I have no connection whatever with Gibson Research. Hell, I met Gibson
a few times in a previous job and didn't even *like* the guy.
--
Bob Weissman
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