caring for AE Vulcan IDE hard drive

[Dan Bethe <dtm@netcomi.com>]

Hi there.  I have an Applied Engineering Vulcan internal IDE hard drive
on my //gs.  I'm intensely curious about this, until I get a SCSI card. 
I have 1280K RAM, ROM01, 800K floppy, nothing else.  Here's my
ramblings, performance-tuned for verbosity  ;)

SITUATION:
	From Henrik, I got an archive containing a few AE tools.  AE Vulcan
Partition Manager v1.17 gives me the ability to partition and format the
drive.  AE  Vulcan Interleave Changer v1.02 tells me that it's a 20 meg
Western Digital 93028, with 777 cylinders, 2 heads, and 27 sectors.  It
says the interleave factors are "native=3" and "current=7".  And I have
a Vulcan CDA that allows simple changes, and a Vulcan GS/OS driver ('get
info' says "Created: Thu, Dec 14, 1989, 1:48pm").
	I took that serial number to http://www.wdc.com and looked up the specs
on that drive.  I found one just like it but with a trailing letter at
the end, like "93028A" or something, which had almost the same geometry.
	I formatted it with these tools and settings.  It seemed to work fine. 
But just for the heck of it, I wanted to do it all with the latest
stuff.  So i got all the GS/OS System 6.0.1 disks.  I stuck the Vulcan
GS/OS driver on the Install disks's "Drivers" folder and started up with
that.  I used Adv.Disk.Util from there, to zero it.  Zeroing resulting
in an error after several minutes.  Erasing and Initializing worked fine
and took only a few seconds.  But GS/OS's Initialize feature lists only
a different interleave, of something like 11:1.
	Then I did the Installer's normal "install to hd" script and here I
am.  The drive has a history of bad sectors in the last 16MB of it,
although after formatting it I've had one error -- but I've only written
2.6MB to it.
	I read the portion of Nathan's FAQ that deals with AE's, and I've done
searches on it for "hard" and read those.  Perhaps Nathan can build my
info into the FAQ.  And perhaps someone has the original AE software, or
else I can submit what I've got for others.

QUESTIONS:
	Do I have the latest or best software for dealing with this drive?
	What is the purpose of that Vulcan driver beyond what's in the IDE
controller firmware?
	Will other IDE drives work on this card?  It appears to have a
"standard" IDE connector.
	If I don't want to use the drive anymore, is it a reliable power
supply?  I guess so!  :)
	What is the optimal interleave for typical //gs?  Most of our files are
a few kilobytes.
	Did formatting it with Adv.Disk.Util actually change the interleave? 
Vulcan Interleave Changer reports that it's still the same as its
original default, afaik.
	Which is the best software to format it with?
	How can I best detect and correct errors?  Can they be marked bad and
unusable?
	Is there any other way to performance-tune this guy?

	THANKS VERY MUCH TO ANYONE!