HD Tach opinion wanted

[Daniel Stokes]

I was just reading through some random posts, and read the name HD Tach for
the first time. Up until now, I've been using Winbench 99 and Winstone 99.
Any thoughts on HD Tach? Pretty reliable? How's the impact on Win98 when
it's installed? Nominal? Can it be run on a system that already has an OS
and Apps installed? HD Tach's website referred to *not* attempting to
preserve data, but I'm not sure if that's just the registered version that
does Write tests. Anyway, worth running?

Any thoughts will be appreciated.

Daniel

[Charles G. Paluda]

Yes, definitely worth running. It's a Win9x program and is very small,
only the registered version does destructive testing, the free one is
perfect for most HD benchmarking.

Charles

[Bob Willard]

Daniel Stokes wrote:
>
> I was just reading through some random posts, and read the name HD Tach for
> the first time. Up until now, I've been using Winbench 99 and Winstone 99.
> Any thoughts on HD Tach? Pretty reliable? How's the impact on Win98 when
> it's installed? Nominal? Can it be run on a system that already has an OS
> and Apps installed? HD Tach's website referred to *not* attempting to
> preserve data, but I'm not sure if that's just the registered version that
> does Write tests. Anyway, worth running?
>
> Any thoughts will be appreciated.
>
> Daniel

If you want to know how well your HD and its path to memory are
performing, then HDtach is the gold standard.

Running HDtach in read mode (the only mode in the freebie version)
is not destructive. Installing HDtach requires very little.

Getting repeatable, reliable, results from HDtach - or from nearly
any benchmark - does require a "quiet" system. And, from the
recurring complaints that ScanDisk won't run to completion,
many casual PC users don't understand how to find and bag all
those disquieting processes.
--
Cheers, Bob