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.
