Checkhd < Atari

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---++ Checkhd

<img src="%ATTACHURLPATH%/checkhd.jpg" alt="checkhd.jpg"  width="456" height="382" align="right" />
Some fellow Atari user had a faulty hard disk drive, and in an effort
to help him, I wrote some diagnostic software which checked a
hard disk for low-level read errors - this is how CHECKHD was
born. Later, the software evolved by adding benchmark code.
Back in those days, I wrote mass storage device
reviews for the ST-Computer magazine - I simply needed a way to
compare the performance of all those hard disks.

So CHECKHD is a hard disk checker and benchmark program. It was part of 
[[Scheibenkleister]], but was also distributed (in a special version)
along with certain Vortex hard drives.

What was cool about this software was that it tried to closely match
the methods which hard disk makers used to measure access times
and transfer rates, by coding as close to the metal as possible. 
The idea was to establish
a low-level benchmark to check the speed of new hard disks. These days,
=h2bench= ([[http://www.heise.de/ct/ftp/ctsi.shtml][c't magazine]])
is probably closest in spirit to CHECKHD.

For my reviews, I also used higher-level tests (such as file copy
tests). So we used CHECKHD to find out what the hardware could do,
and higher-level tests to find out how much performance was lost
on the way through the disk driver software stack (disk driver,
BIOS, GEMDOS, application code).

See the [[%ATTACHURL%/CHKHD83.TXT][German Readme file]] for more
information. Download the complete CHECKHD 8.3 package from [[http://www.clausbrod.de/download/atari/chkhd83.tos][here]] (self-extracting
archive).

For your amusement, I even found a few old benchmark results:

%EDITTABLE{header="| *Drive* | *Cyl. to cyl. (ms)* | *1000 random seeks (ms)* | *1000 wide seeks (ms)* | *1000 short seeks (ms)* | *Read test (KB/s)* | *Transfer I/II tests (KB/s)* | *Geometry* | *Notes* |" format="| text,30, | text,10, | text, 10, | text, 10, | text, 10, | text,10, | text, 10, | textarea,4x30, | textarea,4x30, |"}%
|*Drive*|*Cyl. to cyl.*|*1000 random seeks*|*1000 wide seeks*|*1000 short seeks*|*Read test*|*Transfer I/II tests*|*Geometry*|*Notes*|
| Quantum LP240S GM240S01X (SCSI) | 2.4 | 18.6 | 31.8 | 21.1 | 865 | 1139 / 1302.5 | 1818 cylinders, 87 sectors/track, 4 heads, 479350 sectors | TOS 1.06<br /> |
| Quantum P105S 910-10-94x (SCSI) | 3.9 | 22.8 | 35.8 | 23.8 | 455 | 579.3 / 587.5 | 1019 cylinders, 33 sectors/track, 6 heads, 205075 sectors | TOS 1.04 |
| Atari Megafile 44 (Syquest SQ555, SCSI) | 7.8 | 35.2 | 48.7 | 24.7 | 199 | 456.3 / 912.7 | 1275 cylinders, 34 sectors/track, 2 heads, 86700 sectors |  |
| Seagate 296N (SCSI) | 5.9 | 34.2 | 61.8 | 30.8 | 470 | 751.8 / 1000 | 817 cylinders, 34 sectors/track, 6 heads, 165851 sectors | CHECKHD 8.1, TOS 1.04 |
| Seagate ST157N (SCSI) | 6.48 | 33.89 | 65.85 | 33 | 476 | 663.8 / 775 | 613 cylinders, 26 sectors/track, 6 heads, 94860 sectors<br /> | GE-SOFT hostadapter |
| Conner CP3540 | 1.5 | 12.5 | 18.3 | 13.1 | 1030 | 1358.2 / 1582.5 | 1807 cylinders, 50 sectors/track, 12 heads, 1062516 sectors |  |
| Vortex <nop>DataJet 45 (Fujitsu M2611S) | 3.7 | 23 | 37.1 | 24.2 | 299 | 487.4 / 657 | 1336 cylinders, 34 sectors/track, 2 heads, 88044 sectors |  |
| Rodime RO3258TS | 2.7 | 19.2 | 37.5 | 19.7 | 554 | 693 / 716.6 | 1216 cylinders, 41 sectors/track, 9 heads, 410211 sectors |  |
| CSS GIGAFILE 650 (Sony SMOD 501) | 6 |  | 184 | 98 |  | 206 / 310 |  | Optomagnetic drive |
| Atari SH205 (Seagate ST225) | 13 |  | 150 | 73 |  | 408 / 778 |  |  |
| LACOM SD40Q (Quantum) | 5 |  | 36 | 24 |  | 778 / 778 |  |  |


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r1.2 - 07 Feb 2005 - 07:47 - ClausBrod to top
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