Category : HD Utilities
Archive   : HRDDISK.ZIP
Filename : SUPPLE1.TXT

WHY NOT TO WORRY ABOUT INTERLEAVES
A supplement to
HOW TO FINE-TUNE YOUR HARD DISK
By Mark Minasi

If you've read anything about disk optimization, you've probably
heard of the notion of setting the right interleave for your drive.
Interleaving is the process of arranging sectors on a track in such a way
that the entire track can be read quickly. PC gurus used to worry quite a
bit about how to interleave a disk, largely because the period from 1983
through 1989 saw vendors selling computers with incorrectly interleaved
disks. You won't need to worry about it for two reasons, however. First,
today's drives are already interleaved in such a fashion that they provide
data-transfer rates far in excess of what older drives could even hope for.
The original XT's hard drive couldn't provide data to the system at a rate
any faster than about 80K per second. Hard disks nowadays commonly transfer
data at rates of around 1200K per second and up, so there's no point in
trying to improve things by tinkering with the interleave.
But the second reason to forget about interleaving is the really
telling one. Today's drives tend to use a technology called IDE, or Imbedded
Drive Electronics. (No, imbedded isn't spelled as you normally see it; this
is the way the drive folks spell it.) IDE packs a lot of drive into a small
and inexpensive package, but in doing so it cuts a few corners. One of those
corners concerns reinterleaving. You can actually permanently damage some
IDE drives by reinterleaving them, so don't get an interleave program off
your local bulletin board and start messing with your drive.
If you really want a program that will adjust interleaves but can
first determine whether or not it's safe to adjust them, get Spinrite ][ from
Gibson Research. Spinrite has a street price of about $70.