Wary of "quick start" drive SW for new harddrive

  • Thread starter Thread starter KWW
  • Start date Start date
K

KWW

New drives have often come with a software application to speed
installation. They may be called "Disk wizard" or some such title. Years
ago, anyway, these installed some sort of dynamic drive overlay - something
like a lookup table to the drive contents. This resulted in both slightly
slower operation and problems when trying to do some maintenance operations
down the road.

Do the new quick start applications continue to do this sort of thing? To
date I have been going the slow manual route of setting the partition and
formatting. As drives have gotten larger, this takes time! I thought I
would consult the collective knowlege of the group rather than spend time I
do not have to research, and then double and tripple check (and even then
wonder if something was simply poorly documented).

TIA.
 
Western Digital like you to use it since they can install a monitoring / ad
supplying "Diagnostic" piece of junk... to go with their hardware piece of
junk :)

I suspect others have similar ulterior motives.

You are correct be wary.

The exception is for drives over 137 GB if your hardware does not have built
in support for the addressing, then you may have no choice.

There may be some value in others, perhaps a special multiple write
technique to stamp the format (it is magnetic after all) firmly in place but
I suspect you'll then find differing theories and probably some BS.

From experience (The hard way) avoid WD like the plague, 90% early failure
rate and I'll argue that one with Satan himself because I've experienced it
and of course ignore anything with SONY on the front because they are
dishonest.

Hitachi, Maxtor, IBM and especially Seagate seems the way to go. In fact
anything except the aforementioned clowns :)

Charlie
 
KWW said:
New drives have often come with a software application to speed
installation. They may be called "Disk wizard" or some such title. Years
ago, anyway, these installed some sort of dynamic drive overlay - something
like a lookup table to the drive contents. This resulted in both slightly
slower operation and problems when trying to do some maintenance operations
down the road.
Click to expand...

Disk overlays are used when your PC cant see the entire size of the
drive due to your mobo/bios limitations.

It is NOT a recommended thing to run.
 
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