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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Which came first, DriveSpace or Norton Speed Disk? I thought Norton was first.
I believe so yes
Different tools. Speed disk was a disk defragmenter, DriveSpace was whole disk compression. The Norton tool you’d have used a lot if you used DriveSpace was Norton Disk Doctor.
And as I recall, Norton had all the tools long before MS-DOS included them by default. It was sort of a dick move by Microsoft, the sort of thing they're famous for now.
DOS has always? had chkdsk, but ndd had a knack for being able to recover data from minor corruptions way better than chkdsk did. Scandisk (dos 6 version of chkdsk) was just a prettier face, ndd was still better.
Between ndd, Spinrite, and I can’t remember the name of the undelete tools, I saved a lot of homework assignments.
chkdsk in dos never had the ability to scan the disk surface for defects, ndd did that, and then magically scandisk showed up and looked awfully similar to ndd.
But I agree, some really great tools. And sysinfo was our de facto "how fast is this thing?" for years.
Indeed. It really was the end of an era when they went to shit.
Did anyone figure out if scandisk was actually licensed from someone else? I know that lots of the other MS utils were - defrag, undelete etc
Raise your hand if you used to sit and watch Norton's defragger do its thing! 🤩
Didn't speed disk do an optimised defragment operation, putting OS files at the start of the drive etc