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

[Justin Goldberg]

But exactly how does it do its disabling of the drives internal ec and do its defect analysis? What kind of voodoo does it do on the drive? This has never been documented. It makes sense to use it on older drives (I keep 5.0 in my utility toolchest for the odd mfm/rll drive I encounter) but with the advanced error correction in newer drives it doesn't make sense. 

I dug up this discussion from the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage group:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage/browse_thread/thread/958d7e095d15c3fc/ce0dec6a189c5eae?lnk=gst&q=Spinrite#ce0dec6a189c5eae

Here's one quote from Arno:

Their product used to have some merit in the old MFM times. Today, they are just cashing in on the remainder of that reputation. 


I don't want to engage in a flame-war, and the vagaries of low level magnetic storage isn't really my thing, so I'll drop out of the discussion. The discussion I linked to above goes quite in-depth. 


On Fri, 11 May 2012 21:09:45 -0400, ale-bounces at ale.org wrote:
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