UG Network _/_ UG Library _/_ Reviews

A review of
FWB's Hard Disk Tool Kit 2.0
(and a few reasons why you would want to use it.)

...by Eric Fretz

When the company FWB created Hard Disk Took Kit 1.0 in the early 1990's, it was, IMHO, the best hard drive formatting utility around. It was powerful, yet easy to use, and offered tons of cool options. Basically, it put amazing power in your hands, yet allowed you to use it for practical purposes without too much effort. (gee, how appropriate that it was written for a Mac!) It came with a super tutorial book that explained more than most folks can (or need to) grasp about hard drives, data structures, and SCSI. Unfortunately, it worked only for SCSI drives, and when I upgraded to a new Powerbook in early '96, I found it had an IDE drive.

For those of you who rarely wander over into the morass of conflicting standards that is the "Windoze" world, allow me to explain. A common type of hard drive for PC's (Wintel type) is known as IDE. It is cheaper than SCSI because it basically plugs right into the motherboard, and therefore requires no adapter card or special electronics. It is not as flexible as SCSI, but in the PC world, bargain prices rule, so IDE is quite popular. In recent years, our beloved APPLE began to ship IDE drives in some Macs! In the case of the Performas, it was to cut costs - In the case of the Powerbooks it was simply that no manufacturer would continue making 2.5 inch hard drives in SCSI format if only APPLE was going to use them (just not enough being sold). Since HDTK 1.0 does not work with IDE drives, when I heard about version 2.0 being out, I purchased it right away. After using it for a few months on several Macs, here is my short review, followed by a section on just why you would want to use HDTK 2.0, anyway.

Overall - Three and a half out of five stars. (for comparison, I gave version 1.0 four and a half stars).

The 2.0 software is just as robust as the original. It deals with SCSI Manager 4.3, and IDE drives with ease. You can format and partition and update drivers in a snap. The new "Auto-Initialize" feature makes setting up a simple "one volume" disk a breeze. The manual is still chock full of info too. So, why did it lose a star? Because FWB changed how the software is packaged - AND YOU CAN NO LONGER RUN THE COMPLETE FORMATTER FROM A HARD DISK DRIVE! That's right folks, you now must own TWO hard drives to access the full functions of the program. (One to install onto and boot from, and then the OTHER drive - the one you want to format) If you are lucky enough to have a Macintosh system with a CD ROM and a bootable System CD, you can work around this (perhaps this is why it was done) - but by no stretch of the imagination does every Mac user fall into this category (and that included me!)

There is a crippled version that will do simple formats which boots/runs from a floppy, but not the FULL program. Although there is a mention of this in the manual, I feel strongly that this should have been advertised more clearly. (Perhaps something like: "NEW! IMPROVED! NOW REQUIRES TWO HARD DRIVES!!") IMHO, it is unreasonable to expect ALL users to have a second drive or System CD. For the many that don't, creating a bootable system on that external drive or ZIP type drive is an unnecessary hassle.

In the end, I did create a bootable ZIP cartridge, and get the job done that way - but I refuse to believe that the same program that ran beautifully off a floppy in version 1.0 had to lose that functionality in 2.0 just because it now works for IDE drives. Heck, they could have made two boot disks, one for SCSI and one for IDE. In summary, it is still a great program, but changing the floppy boot disk was a poor decision.

Now, just why would you want to use HDTK in the first place? Three reasons: EFFICIENCY, SECURITY, and SPEED.

First, let's talk SPEED. Hard Disks are recognized and controlled by the Mac System software using chunks of code called "drivers". If the driver is old or uses unusual rules in handling data, the flow of data from your drive to your CPU can be less than optimum. HDTK allows you to use special FWB drivers to control any or all of your drives. You can even replace the driver on an existing disk without formatting it. I have not heard of a driver being rated faster or better than FWB's, but take that with a grain of salt, since I am not an industry CEO or anything.

Damaging it would be to lose control of that data? If you have a Powerbook, this risk is even greater. When someone steals your Mac, they then can misuse ALL of the DATA on the drive. HOWEVER - if you use HDTK security options, you can put a password on the drive, so when it boots up, a password must be entered or the drive is ignored. This protection is so good that even FWB techs cannot get around it. If you forget your password, there is no way back in. Someone could still break the drive open and use sophisticated equipment to read the platters, but that is CIA stuff. If folks like that are stealing your computer, you have other problems! Also, you can opt to ENCRYPT the data on the drive too. This puts all your files in a "code" that reads as gibberish to anyone who does not have the decryption key and password. While this step adds a very strong layer of protection, it will slow down your work, since files on the drive must be de-crypted each time you want to use them. I personally use just the boot password protection.

Lastly, let's talk EFFICIENCY. Your Hard drive keeps data in little "boxes" on the disk itself (these are known as logial or allocation blocks) . There is a practical limit to how many "boxes" the system can keep track of on any given Volume or Disk. ("Disks" and "Volumes" are different, more in a moment) So, if you have a BIG hard drive, of say, two Gigabytes, there is a rule that the formatter follows that makes each individual box big enough to hold a file of several DOZEN Kilobytes (the bigger the total size of the disk, the bigger the "box" must be). This does not seem like a big deal, until you realize that only ONE file can be put in each box. Big files can be split across many boxes, but the SMALLEST amount of space that a file can use is, (for this example), 32K. In this case, be aware that 32K is the equivalent of dozens of pages of text and simple graphics. So, on this example hard drive, a single ALIAS which is less than 1K of actual data will take up a WHOLE BOX (32K). Multiply that by a hundred aliases and you are talking MEGABYTES of wasted space! And it is not just ALIASES - every small file you create, from notes to Email will take up 32K no matter how small it actually is!! Think of the Houston Astrodome and all those seats as a big drive platter. If the "data" we want to store is all about the size of a person (big files) then that size is OK, but think of all the wasted space if we were trying to store ping-pong balls, one per seat!!!

To avoid this problem, you can do something called PARTITIONING. When you partition a drive you create separate VOLUMES which each look like a separate drive to your Mac. SO, if I had a drive of 750 Meg, I could create one partition of 300 Meg and install a system on it for my boot volume. Then, I could create a 100 Meg partition with password protection for my personal data. Then I could use the remaining 350 Meg to create two equal partitions of 175 Meg for storing other data. EACH of these volumes would show up on my desktop with a separate icon. If there was data corruption on one, the others would not be affected! For EACH of these volumes, the "box" size is much smaller than for a single volume of 750 Meg, so I save space with each and every file I put on the drive! Also, since I have several smaller volumes, I can do many things more quickly, such as Virus scan or use a text search utility to find that old letter to my boss, since I am working with fewer megabytes of data.

A partition note for Power-users: the partitions we are speaking of here are "HARD" partitions as defined by Inside Macintosh specs, as opposed to "SOFT" partitions that can be created by some utility software. HARD partitions are standard to the MAC and very reliable. SOFT partitions generally depend on the special Extensions and the utility software that created them to work right. They are really just big files on your existing hard drive, and if they get corrupted at all, your soft partition can be wrecked. I personally advise against using anything other than APPLE standard "Hard" partitions on your drive.

So, for the sake of SPEED, SECURITY, and EFFICIENCY, you can put a formatting program like HDTK 2.0 to work for you. In fairness, it should be noted that the newest versions of APPLE's Disk Format utility (free with system software) can now preform password protection and split disks into multiple partitions. I have used APPLE's Formatter and have no complaints, it is just a bit less intuitive, FAR less instructional, and does not give you the FWB drivers or some of the "super-techie" options to tinker with (but most folks won't want to mess with these items anyway).

A FINAL COMMENT - Before you even THINK about using a formatting/partitioning program you ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE A COMPLETE BACKUP OF YOUR DRIVE (preferably TWO Backups!) and a complete set of System Install disks or System CD. It would be best if you had a good working knowledge of how to restore your backup, also. Happy Formatting!

FINAL HUMOROUS THOUGHT The sticker on the package said "requires Windows95 or better" - so I bought a Mac.

THE AUTHOR Is a part time Macintosh consultant and a Mac User since 1985. He can be reached for questions, comment, and discussion at EBFretz@AOL.COM or at (313)-284-3999. He is a member of the Detroit Macintosh Users Group, www.macgroup.org.

IF YOU WISH TO USE THIS ARTICLE - Permission is granted by the author for non-profit user groups to reprint this article in user group newsletters. The author requires that the article be credited to him, and, if edited (shortened, abbreviated, etc), the inclusion of the phrase "this article has been edited from its original form by the publisher of this newsletter". The author requests a copy of the newsletter in which the article was used be sent to him (please Email to EBFretz@aol.com for latest address).


USER GROUP EDITORS: Articles posted in this area have been cleared for publication in your newsletters. We do encourage you to contact the author for additional details and/or updates. Please ALWAYS credit the original author!
Articles posted here by UGNetwork News staff, or the UGN News Service may be reproduced ONLY after your group has become a registered Network affiliate. Contact the UGNet-News for authorization and the UGNet News Affiliate publicity package. Thank you. Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997, The User Group Network, and on behalf of the respective authors.
All of this content, and the associated services are donated through the generous efforts of members from the User Group community. This content area is provided by The User Group Network News Service, and is sponsored by The Design & Publishing Center as a public service.