In regard to the concept of drive degradation being "hidden" by controllers.<br>It seems to be a needful evil for the current applied art and science of rotating magnetic media at these price points. Yes, I suspect we "could" make media, heads, positioning methods et all that would be "true" non contact under most practical conditions.
<br><br>The game is a paraphrasing of an older tech rubric- Cheap- Fast- Stable=pick any 2.<br> <br>So the SMART ancestral concept was actually devised as an end run around those rules.<br>Setting a scoring metric for considering a "data element" as pass/fail is still a moving target.
<br>Set your metrics too conservative and a drive becomes so apparently crappy that you would consider it as unsafe to trust. Set the metrics too optimistic and you replicate the ZIP drive impact- cheap- comparably fast for a floppy replacement- but dangerously unstable at times.
<br>Some comments here invoked the Gibson drive tools. There is a Zip issue called Click of Death.<br>Mr Gibson did some excellent research into the cause, prevention, and recovery from the issue<br>That body of work gives some insight to how modern drives work and fail.
<br><br>There's an element of Schrodinger's Cat indeterminate factors inherent in dimensions approaching or even exploiting quantum effects. Modern heads owe their ancestry of late more to a hall effect transistor than a magnetic coil. That allows flying head gaps to be larger for the same signal than older heads. Which paradoxically makes a head crash more devastating due to higher impact forces if from nothing else than SPEED! I could go on at length but It would be out of scope for the concept this thread is working out. Here's my topical constructive query .
<br><br>In the form of a friendly challenge- Let's see who can share with our group the most useful Open Source usable from Linux tools to interrogate drive controllers as to true drive metrics.<br><br>Show us the code....
<br><br>Oren <br><br>