Exactly what does a FDADP do for *reading*? Nothing
that I can figure,
other than re-arrange the 50 line SA-800 interface to a 34-line SA-400
type.
"Current" versions ("since 2009") have two small 7-segment LEDs that
display current track number.
THAT might be handy sometime, although most such times are amenable to
software methods.
Analagous example: When installing the beta version of Windows 3.10, it
would hit an unrecoverable error at a certain point. But, SMARTDRV
wouldn't permit anything other then futile further retries (since
SMARTDRV had already reported SUCCESS), or abort the installation, at
which time, it destroyed all indication of where on the
disk the problem was. Neither SSTOR nor Spinrite could find the
consistent bad spot. If I had known cylinder and head, I could have
trivially mapped out the bad spot. I should have written a TSR to be able
to interrupt and find out! (Without SMARTDRV, I could have done
an "Ignore" and renamed the specific file that failed into "BADSECS",
and
written another copy of that file to another location.) I told MS Win31
beta support that write-cacheing of SMARTDRV (which at that point could
not be turned off!) was capable of creating disasters that would
ultimately force recalls (DOS 6.00 to 6.20 replacement); they said that it
was a HARDWARE problem, not THEIR problem, and that it was not the
responsibility of the OS to find, work around, nor recover gracefully from
hardware problems.