Page 3 - January_Newsletter_2021

A.G.M.

This month we would normally be holding our A.G.M. but due to the current lockdown re-
strictions that will not be possible. We will arrange the meeting as soon as we have a date for re-
commencing our meetings.

Ever wondered how well your hard disk is

performing?

There is now a way to check how well your computer’s hard disk is performing. Most modern
disks can provide SMART statistics, which show you various diagnostic values. However, many
of these are meaningless as a single set of figures. It is only by comparing the values over a period
of time, that you can spot when a disk is beginning to have problems, or may even be on it’s way

to failure.

Even these do not give you any indication of whether you disk is performing as well as it can, and
if the performance is similar over the whole disk.

Steve Gibson of GRC ( I have talked about him several times in the past at club meetings), has
been working on the latest update to SpinRite, his disk monitoring and recovery software. One of
the problems with the existing version of SpinRite ( v6.0) is that it was developed in the early
2000’s when disks were much smaller than now, and were mainly connected via IDE cables and
interfaces. With the growth in disk sizes, and it’s reliance on the BIOS to “talk to” the disks, some
people were facing the prospect of days of waiting for SpinRite to complete.

In the latest work, Steve has developed new ways to interface with the disks at a very much faster
rate as part of the development of version 6.1 of SpinRite. He has extracted part of this work as a
free utility called ReadSpeed which accurately monitors the performance of IDE, SATA and
eSATA disks connected via IDE or AHCI controllers.

To give you a flavour of what this tells you, here is the report from one of my machines.