HD TACH 2.70 README FILE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1)	PLAIN ENGLISH LICENSE
2)	NEW COMPANY NAME, PLANNED DEVELOPMENT OF 3.0
3)	NEW IN 2.70, RELEASE HISTORY
4)	KNOWN ISSUES
5)	USING HD TACH
6)	WINDOWS NT/2000/XP NOTES
7)	FAQS, HELP AVAILABLE ON WEBSITE

SECTION 1 – LICENSE

Use of the software indicates your acceptance of this agreement.  This copy of HD Tach is licensed for non-commercial use only.  Home users may download HD Tach free of charge and use the software for non-commercial purposes.  Commercial users may evaluate HD Tach for seven days with this copy, but must contact support@simplisoftware.com for permission to use the software beyond the evaluation period.  

Media outlets, including recognized magazines, journals and web review sites may be granted a license to use HD Tach free of charge.  Contact support@simplisoftware.com for details.  

The software is sold and distributed "as is" and without warranties as to performance or merchantability, expressed or implied.  The user assumes all risks of using the software.  The seller's liability is limited exclusively to product replacement or refund of the purchase price, if any.

SECTION 2 – NEW COMPANY NAME, PLANNED DEVELOPMENT OF 3.0

In 1999 the assets TCD Labs, Inc., including HD Tach, CD Tach and DVD Tach, were purchased by Oak Technology.  The development team for TCD Labs joined Oak Technology as employees and did not have the time or resources to update the benchmarks in a meaningful way as they focused on development of the SimpliCD recording package.  Oak Technology has exited the CD recording market, and the development team has formed a new company, Simpli Software, Inc.  Simpli Software will focus on new productivity applications, as well as consulting in our core areas of storage, including CD and DVD recording and device driver development.

In addition, Simpli Software has acquired the benchmarking assets from Oak Technology and has started development of HD Tach 3.0.  HD Tach 3.0 will be entirely rewritten in our quest to offer the best benchmarking tool possible.  We will also be developing or considering development of new tools for CD, DVD, flash and other removable storage benchmarking.  

We invite members of the general public, media and OEM hardware companies to contact us using our online forums at www.simplisoftware.com/Forums with comments on the current HD Tach and desired features in a future HD Tach.  New versions of our benchmarks will continue to allow free non-commercial use, however, as before advanced features will only be available in a registered or commercial version.

SECTION 3 – NEW IN 2.70, RELEASE HISTORY

2.70
·	Windows NT, 2000 and XP users may now perform random access, CPU utilization, burst speed and sequential read tests with the unregistered, non-commercial version of HD Tach.  Write testing is still only available to registered users.
·	Updated burst speed graph to account for higher speed IDE and SCSI interfaces.
·	Redefined HD Tach definition of a megabyte to 1,000,000 and a gigabyte to 1,000,000,000. Previously HD Tach used the binary definition of 1,048,576.  This seems to be the industry standard, however some software, including operating systems, still use the binary definition.
·	Removed the Advanced size check feature.  The advanced size check feature was added in an earlier version to attempt to detect hard drive sizes when HD Tach was not calculating it properly from the OS.  This feature ended up not working as well as expected and caused confusion among users.

2.61
·	Fixed a bug with removable drive (ZIP, Jazz, floppy, LS-120) support.

2.60
·	Added advanced size check (for large drives that are detected as 8gb instead of their actual size).
·	Improved efficiency of burst test to detect higher (Ultra66/U2W SCSI) burst rates.

2.54
·	Fixed a bug that allowed hard drive caches to affect write benchmark. New code to calculate drive length and sector size - should work better with larger drives and RAID arrays.
·	Updated burst speed graph to account for UltraSCSI devices (the log file hdtach.log results were always accurate).

2.53
·	Workaround for write speed test - drive caches were inflating numbers.

2.52
·	Support for floppy drive and LS120 floppy added.
·	Windows NT support is only available in registered version.
·	Write test only available in registered version.

SECTION 4 – KNOWN ISSUES

WINDOWS 95/98/ME AUTOINSERT NOTIFICATION -
HD Tach may be incompatible with CD/DVD autoinsert notification on some Windows 95/98 systems.  This incompatibility will cause a blue screen error.  If this error occurs you must disable autoinsert to run the test.  Disable autoinsert by using Control Panel.  From Control Panel double click System, click on Device Manager, click on CDROM, then disable autoinsert in the Settings of each CD or DVD drive.  You must reboot for this change to take effect.  After running HD Tach you can enable autoinsert through the same procedure.

REMOVABLE MEDIA DRIVES, PLUG AND PLAY –
HD Tach does not have explicit support for removable media drives or plug and play devices such as USB or 1394.  HD Tach will work on these devices if the media is in place and the drive is plugged in prior to loading the software. 

INCORRECT DRIVE SIZE DETECTED –
HD Tach may not determine the correct drive size on some Windows 95/98/ME systems.  This issue will cause HD Tach to only benchmark the first 8gb of your drive.  In this case, only the CPU utilization, burst speed and maximum read speed will be valid.  Minimum and average read speed results will be incorrect.  

SECTION 5 – USING HD TACH

HD Tach will display a list of drives in the system.  In the unregistered version, (Read Only) will be displayed by each drive - the write test is disabled in the non-commercial version of HD Tach.

Access time (in milliseconds) - time to read one random sector from the hard drive. Includes seek time, latency, and read one sector.

Burst speed (in megabytes per second) - maximum speed of the computer to hard drive interface.  This represents the speed of data transferred from the hard drive on-board-cache to the system memory.  Burst speed can be used to determine if the drive is running at the higher speeds offered by UDMA, ATA100, ATA133, SCSI busses, etc.

Read speed per zone (in megabytes per second) - The test is performed in 32mb zones.  Each zone is displayed on the onscreen graph.  Generally hard drives are faster on the outside of the disc (sector 0) and slower at the inside (end of disc) – your graph should reflect this.

CPU utilization (as a percentage) - This reflects the amount of time the CPU needed to read data from the hard drive.  Generally a good drive interface will use less than 10%.  

SECTION 6 – WINDOWS NT/2000/XP NOTES

HD Tach 2.70 will not be able to display the drive name for Windows NT/2000 and XP.  We have found that plug and play device names were not being displayed properly.  The device number will be displayed as ‘Physical Drive x’.  To determine the device being tested use the displayed drive size.  HD Tach 3.00 will resolve this issue.

SECTION 7 – FAQS, HELP AVAILABLE ON WEBSITE

Simpli Software will continually update the frequently asked questions list and provide tips on getting the most reliable benchmark results on our website.  Please check www.simplisoftware.com for the latest information.  We have also made forums available for users to discuss benchmark issues at www.simplisoftware.com/Forums.