If you must mhdd all the way. Can boot from floppy, should work on P120 no problem.
kixs wrote on 2023-08-18, 22:50:
Sometimes I use Victoria HDD to do full scan with sector speed statistics.
Im a big fan of Victoria, cant be bothered to boot dos every time 😀.
I always to this with mechanical drives I actually want to use. Sector access times are really useful for spotting
- about to fail/unhealthy drives.
- remapped drives.
A ton of 2-10TB "refurbished" drives nowadays are being sold with erased SMART stats as "new", "old stock" or "almost unused", all a lie and blatant scam. That procedure not only hides running hours/max temp reached, but also moves G-List (growing list of weak/defective sectors) into P-list https://datarecovery.com/rd/what-are-p-lists-and-g-lists/ https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=41352 hiding real drive surface health state.
Then I look at max temp reached during subsequent write cycle. Rotation sound is also important, noisy drive means tired/unhealthy bearing.
Personally I dont keep old HDDs. SSDs/flash cards all the way, there are converters for almost everything nowadays. I would make exception for MFM/RLL drives because I find the way they work cool, like big floppies 😀 I plan to try an implement my own st506 controller some day and experiment with different bitrates/encodings.