WHY NOT TO WORRY ABOUT INTERLEAVES
                             A supplement to 
                     HOW TO FINE-TUNE YOUR HARD DISK
                              By Mark Minasi

        If you've read anything about disk optimization, you've probably 
heard of the notion of setting the right interleave for your drive.  
Interleaving is the process of arranging sectors on a track in such a way 
that the entire track can be read quickly.  PC gurus used to worry quite a 
bit about how to interleave a disk, largely because the period from 1983 
through 1989 saw vendors selling computers with incorrectly interleaved 
disks.  You won't need to worry about it for two reasons, however.  First, 
today's drives are already interleaved in such a fashion that they provide 
data-transfer rates far in excess of what older drives could even hope for.  
The original XT's hard drive couldn't provide data to the system at a rate 
any faster than about 80K per second.  Hard disks nowadays commonly transfer 
data at rates of around 1200K per second and up, so there's no point in 
trying to improve things by tinkering with the interleave.
        But the second reason to forget about interleaving is the really 
telling one.  Today's drives tend to use a technology called IDE, or Imbedded 
Drive Electronics. (No, imbedded isn't spelled as you normally see it; this 
is the way the drive folks spell it.)  IDE packs a lot of drive into a small 
and inexpensive package, but in doing so it cuts a few corners.  One of those 
corners concerns reinterleaving.  You can actually permanently damage some 
IDE drives by reinterleaving them, so don't get an interleave program off 
your local bulletin board and start messing with your drive.
        If you really want a program that will adjust interleaves but can 
first determine whether or not it's safe to adjust them, get Spinrite ][ from 
Gibson Research.  Spinrite has a street price of about $70.