🚀 go-pugleaf

>Will someone familiar with both describe what's different between
>FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit (~$124) and their Personal Edition (~$49)?

As I understand it, the Personal Edition has the formatting program (HDT
Primer) and some of the utilities (Mounter and Light Show, I believe?),
but does not include the disk-benchmarking utility nor HDT World Control
(the tweak-the-firmware-parameters utility).

I admit, I like having World Control... but then again, I'm a tweaker.

- It lets you examine and change the various Mode Sense pages supported
  by your drive.  You can adjust the drive's automatic-retry counters,
  the spare-sector allocation algorithms, the flags which control
  automatic reallocation ("sparing out") of dubious blocks during reads
  or writes, etc.

- It lets you examine the bad-sector lists.

- It lets you reallocate a block manually.

- It lets you tweak other things to your heart's content... including
  tweaks which could have evil effects on your drive or its performance.

For the average user, the Personal Edition is probably entirely
adequate, and the price is right (competitive with Drive7).  Hard Disk
Toolkit is a good disk-driver package (it'll drive an older Rodime
without difficulty... not many third-party drivers can do so), it
performs well, and I haven't had any compatibility problems with it at
all.  FWB's update policy is enlightened and friendly... all of their
updates to date have been free "mail back the master disks and we'll
upgrade them" ones.


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