[ale] what exactly does a long smart hdd test do?

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

"Michael H. Warfield" <mhw at wittsend.com> wrote:

>Oh, LORD, I told myself I was not going to get sucked into another
>Steve
>Gibson cesspool religious discussion, yet here I am...
> 

>
>My personal opinion from both the disk storage angle and the security
>angle is that Steve Gibson is now little more than snake-oil surviving
>on past glories.  

Hi Mike W.,

I appreciate the technical information you've shared.  I truly don't mean any offence  by the following statement and hope you don't take it that way, but, based on the quotes above, I have to ask myself if you're being totally objective, as those quotes sound like a definite negative bias.

In particular, snake-oil implies to me that Mr. Gibson is engaged in deception, fraud, or deceit; and, I really don't think that is the case.  I trust that he's looking out for the best interests of his listeners.  I have no qualms about the $ 89 I paid him once upon a time years ago for SpinRite.  I think it's been worth every penny.  I will admit that there are now cheaper alternatives that do most of what SpinRite does.

Yon mention 3 things which SpinRite mainly does which I would agree to.

1) Deal with data fading.  This could also be called grown defects or bit rot.  I think we can certainly say that no magnetic surface is perfect, and that some sectors or parts of sectors will be magnetically weak.  Hopefully, the controller will catch those and avoid using them.  The real question is, will the weak ones that the controller didn't catch get weaker over time, and will data that was once stored become inaccessible after being ignored and not accessed for a long time.  You say it's not relevant to modern drives.  I'm not totally convinced, but I need to do some homework to discuss it much further.

2) Data recovery of bad sectors / blocks.  This can obviously be relevant, as drives do fail for any number of non mechanical reasons.  By definition, we're talking about sectors that cannot be read by the normal procedures that the OS uses.  So, right off the bat, unless you do something radical, you're going to lose all 1024, 2048, 4096 or whatever bytes are in the sector.  You say other things do this better.  I'm definitely not convinced of that.  However, I'm going to have to study dd-rescue a bit to discuss that.

3) Drive head / servo calibration.  I really wasn't aware of this one.  But, based on what you said, I'll concede that this is probably not relevant to modern drives.

I want to study the technical data you shared and hopefully generate an intelligent reply.  I will admit to being a fan of Mr. Gibson, but I don't think I'm a "fanboy".  I have benefitted greatly both from his security podcast and from the SpinRite product.  My pc is both more secure and more reliable based on my listening to the information he shares.  Having said that, I certainly don't want to be doing 36 hours of exhaustive diagnostics on my hard drives if it's not helpful.  I'm not totally convinced that that is the case however.

I'll also ask myself if I'm being objective when I reply, and keep religion to a minimum.  My only goal is to facilitate maximum reliability of my machines, and those of other people whom I'm in contact with.

I'll write some more later after I've studied your information a bit more.

Sincerely,

Ron


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Ron Frazier
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