Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!ucsd!ames!amdahl!pyramid!prls!philabs!ttidca!svirsky
From: svirsky@ttidca.TTI.COM (William Svirsky)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Disk Technician
Message-ID: <3081@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Date: 23 Aug 88 22:57:21 GMT
References: <613@dogie.edu>
Reply-To: svirsky@tab.tti.com (William Svirsky)
Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica
Lines: 49

In article <613@dogie.edu> fink@vms.macc.wisc.edu (Jerry Fink  - MACC & DACS) writes:
>With all the postings about SpinRite, what about Disk Technician? How does this
>product compare aginst SpinRite?

The July 25, 1988 issue of Infoworld did a head to head review of Disk
Technician Plus and Spin Rite.  Each of these programs uses a different
technique to prevent hard disk problems.  Both programs were tested
on a 20M hard drive that had 2 spots found bad by a Wilson
Winchester disk drive analyzer.

Disk Technician:
Price $130.  Copy protected; you must boot and run from the floppy.
Uses statistical analysis to spot disk errors and then locks out bad
areas.  Unfortunately, the statistical data is stored on the
copy-protected floppy, so you are recommended not to use the program
on more than 1 hard disk.  It's possible though.  It can also
determine what it thinks the optimum interleave is and do a
non-destructive low-level format with the new interleave.  Daily runs
require about 3 minutes for a 20M disk, weekly runs about 15 minutes,
and monthly runs about 3 hours.  Disk Technician found both known bad
spots and also flagged 1 other location as unusable.  If a sector is
found to be unstable, but the data can be recovered, DT automatically
moves the data to a good sector.  Works with ST506 drives with
capacities up to 136M and RLL drives up to 208M.  Should work with
most other drives but won't with some ESDI and SCSI.

Spin Rite:
Price $59.  Not copy protected; 30 money-back guarantee.
Spin Rite is basically a nondestructive low-level formatter.  The
theory behind it is that regularly refreshing the data on the drive
will prevent disk problems caused by not-so-stable media and/or by
slight alignment changes due to wear.  SP does, though, do tests to
insure that a sector can hold data.  Like DT, if it finds an unstable
sector, but can recover the data, it automatically moves it to a good
sector.  It also determines what it thinks is the optimal interleave
and reformats at the new interleave.  SP is designed to be run about
once a month.  It also takes about 3 hours for 20M.  Unfortunately,
SP did not find the 2 known bad spots on the disk, *but*, after
running SP, Infoworld's Hardware Benchmark System disk tests did not
encounter any data errors even though it examined the disk several
times.  Won't work with Priam drives using the EDVR.SYS driver, the
Toshiba laptop hard disk, and systems using CSSL's Awesome I/O card
or the Plus Hardcard.  Only works with partitions up to 32M.


-- 
Bill Svirsky, Citicorp+TTI, 3100 Ocean Park Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90405
Work phone: 213-450-9111 x2597
svirsky@ttidca.tti.com | ...!{csun,psivax,rdlvax,retix}!ttidca!svirsky