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oblivion:
And those who try to defend Spinrite.  :P
-40hz (August 08, 2011, 10:32 AM)
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What Spinrite now is and what Spinrite first WAS are not the same thing. As I said above, Spinrite could non-destructively reinterleave a hard disk -- as well as being able to work out what the best interleave actually was.

Before sector translation made the process impossible, hard disk was both very expensive and performance was directly tied to the interleave of the thing.

Ideally, if you're reading data off a disk, you want to process the contents of the current sector and have the next one just coming under the read head when you're ready for it. A badly interleaved drive (and this is rarely something you did yourself, so they were often interleaved before they ever met the host PC) would have to turn almost a full rotation to get the next sector, so this made a lot of difference to performance.

You might be able to tell how unpleasant this was by the fact that I still remember it so well, despite never having had to worry about it for many, many years...

To reinterleave a hard disk, you backed it up, ran a low-level format -- generally by running the code positioned at D800:5 on the drive controller -- then fdisked, formatted, and hoped for the best. Even though we're probably only talking about 10- or 20 MB drives, this was VERY timeconsuming.

When a company called (cheesily) The Control-Alt Deli called me up and told me about what Spinrite could do -- that's a reinterleave without disturbing the data, so no backup (although I always did one), fdisk, format and test routine required, and given that I had a lot of PCs that all needed looking after and always needed another ounce of performance :) I was first disbelieving -- like, "how is this even possible?" and second, extremely cheerful about the time I was going to save.

What Spinrite's become since then is unimportant. I stand by my original statement that it was a genuinely revolutionary product that did an amazing job. And  :P to you too. :)

rjbull:
I didn't intend to offend anybody - except for people who still believe writing large parts of their applications in assembly is a good idea.-f0dder (August 08, 2011, 10:04 AM)
--- End quote ---

There was a time when it was, though.  The leading DOS shareware word processor PC-Write was written in about equal numbers of lines of Pascal (I think) and assembler, the latter for speed.  My favourite DOS editor, VDE, was assembler, and so were Horst Schaeffer's batch file enhancers.  All these were vital tools for me.  Now, I suppose, some authors are so used to assembler that anything else seems "wrong."

40hz:

What Spinrite's become since then is unimportant. I stand by my original statement that it was a genuinely revolutionary product that did an amazing job. And  :P to you too. :)
-oblivion (August 08, 2011, 12:47 PM)
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@oblivion - Just so there's no misunderstanding, the  :P was directed at f0dder for saying he might only be (jokingly) be acting rude towards people who are arguing for assembly coding. I couldn't resist pointing out (also jokingly) that he has a tendency to lose it whenever Spinrite gets mentioned.

I also do agree that with f0dder Spinrite's relevance to today's disk drives is questionable in the wake of many advances made since it first came out.

But I would like to also like to agree with you that it was (at one time) a very useful addition to a PC tech's toolkit.

I purchased several copies of Spinrite over the years. And I did often use it to fix low level interleave problems on those 'wonderful' drives you got to format by dropping into DEBUG and (for most drives) issuing a G=C800:5 command. After which you got to listen to that hypnotic little ding-dinga-dinga 'serenade' that went on for about a half hour while the drive controller did its thing.

Ah those were the days!  :-\

(Sure don't miss them.)  ;)

Onward! :Thmbsup:

dspelley:
In the days when I had my IBM PC-XT with it's 10MB hard-drive:

Norton Utilities (circa 1982)

Later:

Ecco Pro

wraith808:
Norton Utilities (circa 1982)
-dspelley (August 12, 2011, 12:13 PM)
--- End quote ---

Those were the good old days for Norton.  These days, they're definitely a different animal.

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