Re: A whole bunch of Disk archiving questions...

[schmidtd <schmidtd@my-deja.com>]

On Oct 19, 12:13 pm, dangerman <thedangerman...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Among the Apple II family of disk drives - are there ones that are
> more tolerant of errors or a drive that is better at reading poor
> disks or disks with a weaker magnetic signal?
I haven't found a difference between any of my drives.  I have an
assortment of Disk IIs old and new, and a few off-brands too.

> Should I run speed tests on all my drives to find which is one is the
> most within spec and use that?
I did that.  I seem to remember it is recommended to run a little slow
- 298 RPM or so.  The various disk utilities with speed tests will
often tell you their recommendations.

> What utilities are out there to
> determine drive speed
Most of the bit copiers have a speed test.  Lots of stand alone
utilities do too.

> The duodisk is
> loud enough to wake the dead when it encounters an error...
Ugh.  No kidding!  Nice echo chamber in there.

> I'd like to start transferring disks with copy protection and from
> what I've read - probably the best practice is to use SST to create
> halves and then merge them with Ciderpress?
So far, that's true.  You need to catch up with Deckard's work:
http://boutillon.free.fr/Underground/Outils/DotNIB/DotNIB.html
(ask Google to translate it for you).  And:
http://boutillon.free.fr/Underground/Docs/Fastdsk/Fastdsk_en.html

> Are there copy protection schemes that SST cannot handle?
Oh my, yes.  The .nib format is not particularly well suited to the
more sophisticated protection schemes.