brad@huey.Jpl.Nasa.GOV (Brad Hines) (01/24/91)
My roommate got a flyer for Disk Technician Advanced. It claims that it makes Spinrite, Optune, Norton, etc. obsolete. Is it really up to snuff with the others? -- Brad Hines Internet: brad@huey.jpl.nasa.gov Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, California
ESR@SLACVM.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU (Ed Russell) (01/25/91)
In reply to: >From: brad@huey.Jpl.Nasa.GOV (Brad Hines) >Subject: Disk Technician >Date: 24 Jan 91 00:50:08 GMT > >My roommate got a flyer for Disk Technician Advanced. It claims that >it makes Spinrite, Optune, Norton, etc. obsolete. Is it really up to >snuff with the others? A review a while back indicated that DTA found real and potential bad spots that other products didn't find. I borrowed a copy of the then current version from a friend and tried it. I would make the following comments: 1. It seems to do a very thorough job of analyzing the disk surface and finding bad spots. It also finds marginal spots and marks them for future observation. In subsequent runs, it will determine if the questionable spots are getting worse and mark them bad. It found 15-20 spots on my 40 MB hard disk that Optune, Norton, Mace, PCTools and Disk Manager did not consider bad. 2. It is slower than a banana slug crossing an oil slick. The initial "calibration" run and the "monthly" runs take about three hours to run on a 32 MB partition on my MFM disk (40 MB Toshiba). The weekly daily runs are shorter. That may or may not be a problem in your situation but I have trouble finding time to run it unless I just let it run overnight. 3. It seemed to work fine on my machine at work (MFM) but I didn't purchase it because it didn't work at all on my SCSI at home. The new version is supposed to handle translating controllers but it does not do the same level of analysis as for MFM/RLL. 4. If you use DTA, you are probably making a committment to not run other kinds of low-level analysis products such as Optune or SpinRite. These things may: a) unmark spots that DTA has marked as marginal; or b) clobber the calibration/history information that DTA uses to watch marginal areas. 5. I recommended it to a co-worker. He made the mistake of purchasing it before trying it. It totally screwed up the data on his disk. I don't know if he ever found out what happened as he (understandably) quit using it. That's the only report I have heard of problems with it. Note these comments are in reference to the version previous to the new one for which your roommate got the flyer. This new version is supposed to work on more drive types (such as SCSI or ESDI) with translating or other "funny" controllers but I have not tried it. When I couldn't get DTA to run on my SCSI drive, I wrote the company and asked them why. I got a very quick response. Subsequently, I had occasion to call them to discuss the situation further and found them to be very helpful, and apparently knowledgeable, about disks and their problems. In summary, I basically like DTA but you need to be careful that you are willing to devote the time to run it and that it will run on your machine.