Checkhd

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 (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 German Readme file for more information. Download the complete CHECKHD 8.3 package from here (self-extracting archive).

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

Drive	Cyl. to cyl.	1000 random seeks	1000 wide seeks	1000 short seeks	Read test	Transfer I/II tests	Geometry	Notes
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
Conner CP3540	1.5	12.5	18.3	13.1	1030	1358.2 / 1582.5	1807 cylinders, 50 sectors/track, 12 heads, 1062516 sectors
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
Rodime RO3258TS	2.7	19.2	37.5	19.7	554	693 / 716.6	1216 cylinders, 41 sectors/track, 9 heads, 410211 sectors
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
Vortex DataJet 45 (Fujitsu M2611S)	3.7	23	37.1	24.2	299	487.4 / 657	1336 cylinders, 34 sectors/track, 2 heads, 88044 sectors
Seagate ST157N (SCSI)	6.48	33.89	65.85	33	476	663.8 / 775	613 cylinders, 26 sectors/track, 6 heads, 94860 sectors	GE-SOFT hostadapter
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
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

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