Been trying to inventory old disk and hardware utilities.
Anyone remember Tim Seufert's dctest (the dc was something like "data corruption")?
The idea was to test HDD interfaces. It repeatedly wrote (what was then) a large file to the disk, then read and verified it bit by bit.
I found it actually was a useful troubleshooting tool. (Ex. helped finally pin down an impossibly intermittent issue with a G4 tower to a problem with the interface in one of the drive bays that even a replacement cable couldn't solve.)
Do you think such a tool would still be useful in today's systems? (Could it even get past the size of hard and soft caches in a modern system?)
Anyone remember Tim Seufert's dctest (the dc was something like "data corruption")?
The idea was to test HDD interfaces. It repeatedly wrote (what was then) a large file to the disk, then read and verified it bit by bit.
I found it actually was a useful troubleshooting tool. (Ex. helped finally pin down an impossibly intermittent issue with a G4 tower to a problem with the interface in one of the drive bays that even a replacement cable couldn't solve.)
Do you think such a tool would still be useful in today's systems? (Could it even get past the size of hard and soft caches in a modern system?)
Last edited by a moderator:
