Checkhd

checkhd.jpg 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
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
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
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 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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Revision: r1.1 - 01 Jan 2005 - 21:40 - ClausBrod
Atari > Checkhd
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