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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: RetroNinja on August 14, 2023, 09:04:25 PM

Title: How to check HDD health (before SMART drives)?
Post by: RetroNinja on August 14, 2023, 09:04:25 PM

Does anyone know of a program that I can use to check the health of a 50MB Quantum HDD I have? Obviously this is long before the current tech of SMART.

Title: Re: How to check HDD health (before SMART drives)?
Post by: vince_6 on August 14, 2023, 09:32:05 PM

I use HDSentinel for years, dunno if this works for you though  :(

Title: Re: How to check HDD health (before SMART drives)?
Post by: Jope on August 15, 2023, 08:51:06 AM

Fill it with data you know, read it all back. If there are no read/write errors and the checksums match, the drive still works. No-one will know how long it will continue working, however. :-)

Title: Re: How to check HDD health (before SMART drives)?
Post by: RetroNinja on August 15, 2023, 04:20:09 PM

Thanks, I'll look into this. Did you use this before SMART became a thing?

Title: Re: How to check HDD health (before SMART drives)?
Post by: vince_6 on August 15, 2023, 04:30:31 PM

I can't really remember, but it's been years.

Title: Re: How to check HDD health (before SMART drives)?
Post by: Jope on August 17, 2023, 09:31:28 AM

Quote from: RetroNinja on August 15, 2023, 04:20:09 PM

Thanks, I'll look into this. Did you use this before SMART became a thing?

No, before that we just made regular backups (haha, no cash strapped teenage hobbyist did, but we knew we should have) and hoped the drive doesn't die.

Otoh in the Amiga times most hard disk owners had a lot of their less actively used data on floppies too, thanks to the low price of floppies and small capacity of hard drives.

Title: Re: How to check HDD health (before SMART drives)?
Post by: zipper on August 17, 2023, 11:29:19 AM

Mostly in my towered Amigas I had two backup HDDs...Sometimes even needed when I managed to corrupt the main drive - or once got a virus.