Running Hard Drive Pattern Checks

Hard drives used to come with replaceable spindles of platters. The new platter spindle had to be formatted and then could be brought on line. The drive was stopped, the old platters removed and placed in something that resembled a cake keeper. The new spindle was then put in place and “spun up”. The first step, however, was to verify the drive.

This was done by writing patterns onto the drive. A set pattern was written, and then the drive was read to see that the entire drive worked. Different patterns detected different types of hard drive errors.

A complete set of patterns on a big drive, such as the 200 Megabyte DEC RP06?, could take an entire night. You could start the patterns, go home and sleep through the night, and come back in the morning. The drive then had to be formatted for use, which took about an hour, and then it could be used. All this time, the machine had to be in single user mode, however, so pack formatting had to be scheduled. This was usually done to coincide with the arrival of the man that had the special machine to clean the platters.