🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Sep.14.02.22.53.1988.14264@paul.rutgers.edu> halldors@paul.rutgers.edu (Magnus M Halldorsson) writes:
>
> I was
>one of the first to buy Apple's first hard disk (for the Mac): HD20.

Me too.  One at home, and one at work.

>  Somehow as it's been used more, it has become slower, and slower,
>and ..... It's now to the point that booting up takes 2 min! (approx).

I was at this point a few months ago with my home system.  At work, we
usually get to this point by the end of every year.

>  Fragmentation sounds like a likely cause, but perhaps there is some
>typical intrinsic problem with this hard disk.

Fragmentation is a problem, but the size of the hidden "DeskTop" file
is even worse.  Every time you start an application or copy it to your
HD, its icon(s) get added to this file and they stay there -- forever,
unless you use some kind of utility to clear them out.  Just throwing 
away a file does *not* remove its icons.  Each time you open a window,
boot, start a program or quit a program, this file is searched for the
needed resources.  With a 3-year old hard disk this file is probably huge.

>  Questions:
>   1) Should I reformat it? (It'll take forever to backup) Low-level
>format?

That's what I've done and it works great.  Actually, when forced to back
everything up, you'll find that you will do a lot of "house-cleaning".
My home system had about 14 MB on it and I backed up about 7MB of stuff.
I threw away lots of stuff that I *never* use (while you're at it, why
not get rid of some of those fonts and DA's you don't use :-).  I did 
everything from the Finder, just putting as many folders as would fit on 
each floppy - it took an hour or so.

I then just chose "Erase Disk" from the Finder.  After that, I ran the
"HD-20 Test" that came with my disk (which took about 15-20 min).  Then
I re-built everything.  Where possible, I re-loaded original master copies
of my software so I didn't have to back them up.

The performance increase was unbelievable....try it, you'll like it!
My old 85 ms HD-20 is now running faster than our 17 ms 91 MB SCSI CDC Wren
at work, which has about 40 MB on it now.

>   2) Any disk utilities (de-fragmentizers,diagnosing tools) out there
>that I should get?

I have heard both good and bad things about "Disk Express".  This program
is supposed to de-fragment your HD and fix up the DeskTop file, but it
takes a *long* time to run....I'm a little nervous about using it, so I
haven't tried it yet....

There's a program called "Desk Cleaner" which will empty out the DeskTop
file.  After using it, you'll get lots of "Application couldn't be found
for this document" errors.  These are easily remedied by just opening both
the application and document windows at the same time, then click on the
document icon - this forces the resources to be added to the DeskTop file.

>   3) Anything else I could do? (How much could I get for it, if I buy
>a Jasmine instead....?)
>

Try to find someone with either a original 512 or 512E that wants a HD -
the HD20 is ideal for them since you don't need the SCSI port.  Here
at Oswego, we can buy 20 MB 65 ms Everex SCSI drives for about $440 -
with any luck you could get almost that much for your HD20 from the right
buyer.


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