A Disk Crash Early-Warning Device
The saddest day in the life of any computer user is the day the hard disk crashes.
You’re lucky if all it ruins is your whole day. It could ruin your whole company.
If you’ve diligently backed up all your files on tape, or at least backed up your critical data files on diskette, you can probably recover with your most important programs and files restored. But if, like so many hapless computer users, you aren’t backed up, you’re out of luck.
For less than $100, however, you can gain substantial protection against a catastrophic disk crash with a utility program called Disk Technician Gold, published by Disk Technician Software in San Diego ((800) 847-5000.)
Disk Technician Gold won’t prevent a hard disk from going bad. That’s not possible. But it most likely will give you advance warning that the disk is failing and will move data out of harm’s way. Thus, it can buy you the time to make backups and get the computer checked by a technician.
The program has the distinction of being the only disk analysis software endorsed by a hard drive manufacturer. Seagate Technology, the largest manufacturer of hard drives, has tested and approved Disk Technician Gold. Seagate distributes an industrial version of the program for its dealers and original-equipment manufacturers to use in testing their drives.
You really don’t want your drive tested with the Disk Technician Factory Test version, however, because it destroys all the data on a disk it is testing. The factory, after all, wants to deliver “clean” disks without any remnants of programs or data on them after testing.
The consumer version, Disk Technician Gold, does just the opposite. It preserves all of your data as it tests.
Once installed, Disk Technician Gold is effortless to use because it runs in the background, monitoring every hard disk “read” and “write” that the computer makes. That contrasts with its predecessor version, Disk Technician Advanced, and competing programs such as SpinRite, all of which take over a computer while they are testing the disk. Such programs are run only periodically and offer no real protection against a failure in the interim.
When you first install Disk Technician Gold, it subjects your hard drive to a “media certification” test. This phase does take full control of the computer and may run for several hours or more, depending on the speed of the computer and the size and access time of its hard drive.
Essentially, that test creates a base measurement of the hard drive, which the program stores in a data file for future comparisons.
Thereafter, every time you start the computer, Disk Technician Gold loads into memory and actually takes over from DOS the function of reading and writing data to and from the hard disk.
In a process for which a patent is pending, the program detects hard disk errors by measuring how much time it takes to read or write each chunk of data, known as a sector. When a disk sector is weak, it takes several tries for the computer to read or write data there. That can be measured as additional time because the disk has to spin a full revolution after each failure before the recording head reaches the same spot to try again.
Occasional failures, called soft errors, are normal, and the computer’s hard disk controller is designed to overcome them by retrying a set number of times.
By comparing the location of a current error against those stored in its database, Disk Technician Gold can detect when an area of the disk is beginning to cause problems repeatedly.
When that happens, the data stored there is automatically moved elsewhere, the problem area is marked so it won’t be used again and the user is warned via a pop-up message on the screen. (The message may not appear if you are running some kinds of graphics programs, but a beeping signal will sound the alarm.)
The idea is that you get ample warning before a catastrophic failure occurs. In fact, you may be able to stave off failure by having the computer serviced. The source of the trouble may be simple, such as a loose or corroded cable connection inside or an improperly seated controller card, or even a weak power supply.
Perhaps the greatest stress a disk drive undergoes, by the way, occurs when disk-compression software, such as DoubleSpace in DOS 6.0 or SuperStor or Stacker, is used to compress files to make more disk storage available. The intensive reading and writing can cause an already weak drive to fail. Installation of Disk Technician Gold beforehand will reduce that risk.
Disk Technician Gold also contains a basic virus-protection feature. Since the program handles all the disk writes, it can easily tell if critical operating systems or program files are about to be modified, giving you a chance either to prevent the operation or allow it.
Like other such virus-protection programs, however, it can’t tell the good from the bad. Installing a new program, for instance, sets off an annoying spate of warnings. I disabled the virus feature after deciding that the risk of being infected was too small to be bothered with all those false warnings.
Although Disk Technician Gold carries a suggested retail price of $150, you can buy it over the counter for about $80. Or it can be ordered by telephone from the publisher at $60, under the company’s very liberal “upgrade from anything” policy.
