I think a shoutout to Gibson Research as a company should also be mentioned. My original purchase of SpinRite was in 2009, nearly 16 years ago. Just recently, I received an email from GRC with a code to get the newest version for free, as I was still considered a valued customer. Now THAT'S customer service!
I received the same email and it put a big smile on my face. Companies send offers, advertisements and feedback requests sometimes every day. Steve Gibson sends less than one email per decade.
I bought a hard drive/SSD boot manager called Boot-It by TeraByte in 2005, and I can still download the latest version almost 20 years later. These companies know real customer service. ;)
These guys are old school serious developers. Another one is Ed Hamrick of Hamrick software (Vuescan). I think Dave should know him or meet with him. That single developer software runs on 3 different operating systems with the same quality/interface and supports/maintains 6500+ mostly undocumented scanners!
@@Olgasys - Steve also created ValiDrive which is by far the best and fastest fake SDcard/Flash drive tester. Another guy who writes some great free tools is Nirsoft.
*Raises hand* Steve provided all kinds of cool utilities back in the day. I had no idea Spinrite was still a thing. I'm going to check it out. Lots of old spinning rust sitting on my shelves and in my systems. I wonder if it will work on those old floppies I've been hoarding since the 90's ...
Sadly we're still missing that IPv6 version of Sheild'sUp. Spinrite has also saved my day many times over the years, know loads of data recovery guys that still swear by it today!
His Perfect Password generator is awesome as well. Especially since you can get ones that max out the size of the Wi-Fi keys, for maximum security on a very limited network.
I remember discovering Steve in the 90s when I was learning assembly in college. Was blown away when i heard he used it exclusively to write all the tools on his site. As an effiency freak I immediately became a fan.
Back in the day, commercial technology invoked a feeling when it started up. Things came roaring to life like a jet airliner starting its engines. It felt and sounded expensive, you didn't think you would have a few of them in your house just 2 decades later.
I had a 20MB Supra drive for my Amiga that was similar. Turning that beast on (separate power switch for the hard drive vs the computer) was like punching the throttle on the millennium falcon.
@@fensoxx The dial-up modem ruined start up sounds for me. AOL was no help either. Still remember my mother thought that AOL was the internet, the whole internet... liked they owned it and were the gatekeepers... hahaha
Steve Gibson IS a treasure. Every few years I can't find my copy of Spinrite, so I buy a new one but Steve sends me a message pointing-out that Spinrite carries a LIFETIME license. You only have to pay ONCE. Who else would do business that way?
As a Chief Technologist for Seagate for years, SpinRite is generally done right. There are some errors in Dave's presentation but they are minor. The biggest thing that needs to be said is that if you wish to retain digital data plan to keep essential data on multiple drives that do not depend on each other (RAID is not a solution except for transactional data management or in disk duplication mode), and always keep a full dated copy or two airgapped -- meaning not connected to anything electrical. Safe deposit boxes are useful for this. And plan to make new copies on new drives every few years. Digital storage devices can fail in more ways than you can count and the ones that can preserve data for decades are really not commercially available and often give a false sense of security leading to catastrophic data losses. The design life of storage devices is generally 5 years although it is not unexpected that a given device will preserve storage for 10+a few years. Knowing what i know I buy new drives every year or so and make new full copies as well as keeping at least a couple of copies airgapped all the time. Lightning can, and does, strike. Fire (heat) demagnetizes. It is not true that solid state drives are not magnetic and susceptible to failures associated with magnetic field losses. Foldermatch is a great sister product to Spinright. Don't ever trust the OS vendors. There are some data storage technologies that may change some of my comments (e.g., graphene which is relatively immune to many failure modes) and Dave comments in the future, but some other ones mentioned here and the wonders of Spinrite and Foldermatch are unlikely to ever disappear. Also, demand self-encrypting drives under TCG storage standards, and don't trust the software guys to get the security and privacy right
I was unaware of Foldermatch. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. After reading their FAQ and description, it appears similar to WinMerge. I may try it out to see if it's any better. Normally I use Robocopy to synchronize my backup drives, and occasionally verify integrity using WinMerge in 'binary contents' mode.
The errors are major. Shingled storage is not covered, physical storage is inaccessible behind controller's internal mapping. The whole video is harmful.
my jaw dropped when I read your reply - this is totally my own personal backup strategy! And it's from a former Seagate exec too! Big thanks for your time writing this.
@@vasiliigulevich9202 "The errors are major." Specify the major errors, then. SpinRite is smart enough to recognize SMR drives & will caution end users if there are issues. This isn't like defragging a hard drive, so saying it's "harmful" sounds way too over the top.
As a causal viewer/listerner of both Dave’s Garage and Security Now. I had to watch this video. Security Now just reached episode 1000 and a shoutout was given to your review of spinrite!
I another person mentioed, my bought a copy of Steve Gobson's software back in 2006. I am just speechless that Steve allows for FREE updates. I remember listening to Steve on one of his podcasts back in the day when he sadly mentioned that his wife left him because it was not in him to monetize on underdeveloped software. Apparently, many software companies produce underdeveloped software so later on they could monetize on updates. I am a true follower of his amazing skills and knowledge.
This was indeed very valuable info, never heard of this great software, even though I am interested in this field. Thanks! Sad that it is a bit too expensive for a regular home user.
Steve Gibson is just your kind of guy: meticulous, detail and performance oriented. Old school cool! I'm listening to Steve's podcast "Security Now" since 2005. Just this week the podcast reached episode 999! Give it a listen.
Steve owes you a large beer Dave. I used to listen to his security podcast back when it started. I can tell you that you (and Steve) are correct. I was in uni working on my Bsc in electrical engineering, and I used Spinrite for that job. I used a high freqency sampling scope to read the hardware voltages going to and from the head after the amplifier, and i used that experiment in my dissertation. So i can personally confirm that it does do what Steve claims. While running the test I ran an Iomega zip drive, a poorly western digital IDE drive, and a very expensive at the time seagate sata drive. That refreshed some long fading memories from my internal storage.. 😂
Great podcasts, I tune in too once in a while. While SpinRite may be useful for older hard rives and SSD's, you can do the same by copying a drive to a second spare then back onto the first. heh
@@TRS-Tech - After backing up a drive, I always run a 0xFF/0x00 fill pattern on every byte, essentially flipping every bit to 1 then back to 0. Nothing wrong with using SpinRite, but the same can be done using other free tools.
@@BillAnt How do they shut off the drives hardware and software error correction routines though, you also have the translation between the o/s and the bios to deal with. The way spirite works i believe is to actually issue commands to the microcontroller on the hard drive so you don't have that abstract data to deal with. Some areas of the drive just can't be written to via an operating system interface as that system is running on the drive or if its a secondary drive it's still being paged by the o/s and you have interpreter, the bus, memmory stack and interrupts. I suppose a good analogy would be if you were trying to clean a rug while still standing on it. I'm curious as to what tools you use and the environment you ran them in. I dont know of any other software that could directly command the drive and control the error correction and all the other systems. Even a low level drive format from the bios is not going to find poor sectors and look at swap out tables and all the other systems in the hard drive, its really a computer system in its own right and an incredible piece of engineering.
I've been a long time GRC fan and user of Spinrite but I have to admit I haven't kept up since SSD's came on the scene. Thanks for yet another great episode.
I loved Spinrite back in the day. I had an IBM XT with a 20MB hard drive at the time. I used Spinrite to suggest a better interleave for the drive and let it change it. I ended up with a 50%+ performance boost. My friends were shocked to see how quickly my system loaded game levels 🙂
I remember on my 8088, booting into DOS and a batch file to start Wiin3.1, I would turn PC on and go make a pot of coffee. It would just be opening Windoze when I returned with my cuppa coffee. Then, I would start AOL... 😂
Same here..in the late 80's I had a 286-16 with a 40MB MFM HDD , Spinrite changed the 4-1 interleave to a 1-1 interleave and WOW was a speed difference! @DavesGarage should bring Steve in for an interview.
@@jilbertb Windows 3.1 doesn't run on an 8088. It requires at least a 80286. It was Windows 3.0, that was the last version, that could be run on an 8088 in real mode. Windows 3.1 dropped real mode support and runs only in standard or enhanced mode. Standard mode uses the protected mode of an 80286. Enhanced mode uses the protected mode of an 80386. There were 16 bit protected mode versions of Netscape's browser, so it might be possible to use AOL on an 80286 in standard mode of Windows 3.x.
God, I remember the PDP-11 where they had the multi-platter hard drive in the bottom of the stack in the machine room off my office. I used to play Zork (I think it was Zork) on it in the dinner hour lol. One day the electric company screwed up ( this was in the UK and loads and loads of damage was done throughout the building as the electric cycle rate was accidentally doubled which meant things like ceiling fans doubled their speed and terminal connected to the 3033/3081 mainframes all over (we were mostly programmer/analysts) blew fuses… or did more damage… but not as bad as that poor PDP-11. The hard drive cassette literally screamed. When the technician came out to fix it he had to replace multiple boards in the PDP-11. Poor thing was toast.
IIRC, wear leveling, garbage collection, and block reallocation by the SSD controllers is designed to perform consistent remap operations and gather data to fill each page. Unless this program interacts with a drive through the zoned name spaces system, it won't have real direct access to the pages. Instead it will be doing a full rewrite through abstraction, which doesn't guarantee the desired outcome.
I agree with you, BUT, by rewriting every block it may not write back to the exact same physical block but it has written a 'full charge' to the rewritten blocks, and does so for every block. This seems well worth doing. I have used Hard Disk Sentinel to run a Read/Clear/Write complete run (only available in paid version) about once every 6 months. It will recover marginal cells if possible by using the SSD's built-in ECC in the process. I must have a copy of SpinRite somewhere. Must check it out again 🙂
Yes I was wondering for a while if I didn't understand something, or he was *really* suggesting just rewriting the whole SSD several friggin times. You put it nicely, with the "wear leveling, garbage collection, and block reallocation by the SSD controllers" makes it basically impossible to map logical sectors 1:1 to physical sectors. Which makes the suggestion using this DOS tool - that is completely unaware of SSDs - quite the dumb suggestion. But ok, if that's really the case, maybe that's how things were done at M$ by (ex) M$ engineers and that certainly explains a lot, too.
When I was at school I was assigned the task of coming into the computer room half an hour early to fire up the hard drive. I think it was 1MB and served the whole network. It took nearly half an hour to start up. It was the size of a VCR. Quite a responsibility! The workstations were some kind of Nimbus things running DOS and Windows 1 (possibly 2). Abstract memories!
I love that you made this video. I've been a computer tech (on and off) for 30 years and for most of those, SpinRite has performed miracle after miracle on HDDs and more recently SSDs. Easily the best sixty bucks I ever spent in the 90's.
Story I heard once was that Spinrite was a originally designed as a product for automatically low-level formatting ST-506 drives with the optimal interleave. If you moved a drive to a new controller/computer you could run Spinrite, re-interleave your drive and not loose any data. Remember ST-506 drives are basically just motors and op-amps. No intelligence. That was on the controller. Change the controller and it changes how data is written and read from the drive. Also the tolerances were huge back then as well. So a different controller and/or computer could really throw things off. One of the side effects was that Steve would have to attack the data from multiple angles such as seeking from outer to inner and vice versa in an attempt to read the a particular track/sector. There in Spinrite had the ability to recover data from a drive flaky drive as well. I even believe early versions of Spinrite (like 1 and 2) still had the original automatic interleave that Spinrite was based on..
This is exactly what I used Spinrite for. Whenever I got a new harddrive or swapped it to a different computer, I would use Spinrite to suggest the best interleave. Like you say, it could then change the interleave without any data loss, it was amazing. I sometimes got 50%+ performance increase on the drive.
12:12 I'm wondering how old your SSD would need to be, to not support TRIM (OS support is a separate issue). My boot drive in this system is a Crucial M4 purchased in 2012 and it supports TRIM. Some older SSDs might have a firmware update available to support TRIM. In some cases firmware updates will improve other aspects of data retention, so are worth investigating and installing. I remember the first Samsung 840 TLC drives had performance and data retention problems that were addressed with newer firmware. For many SSD users, a firmware update might help more than SpinRite.
Love it! I used to use SpinRite back in the late ‘80s and ‘90s on old MFM and IDE drives. I think I still have a copy on a 3-1/2 inch floppy disk somewhere….! I went ahead and grabbed a copy of 6.1 today after watching your video…I have a lot of SSDs that are starting to slow down. Version 7.0 supposedly will boot on UEFI-only machines, per Steve’s web site.
there appears to be a basic misunderstanding of how Flash Based memory works. if you read a block and rewrite the block, the ssd can't write to the block that the original data was stored in without first erasing the block. What will really happen is the ssd controller will map a different already erased physical block on the SSD to the original location on the logical drive, and write the data to that block. In the process it will mark the original block as needing to be erased so it can be erased when the drive gets time (this is what is being called garbage collection). If you repeat the process then the data is just written to a third available block and the 2nd block is marked as ready for reclaim. Trim was introduced to ensure unused blocks could be erased and be ready to be written once the OS was no longer using them, unlike spinning disk where you can just write over the old data. Trim help maintain write speeds as erasing a block then writing it takes a lot longer that just writing an already erased block. The procedure outlined seems like a good way to consume the drives limited erase cycles per block, but doesn't really seem to add much benefit. Modern SSD controllers are already looking for degraded blocks and will re-write them (assuming the power is on). Modern SSD Blocks also have extra bits in them for error corrections purposes, have the capability to identify degraded block and will adjust thresholds in an attempt to recover data and re-write to a new block. And they are provisioned with extra blocks above the size rating of the drives, to ensure that there are always some erased blocks on hand, this also allows for some failure of blocks to occur without impacting the size of the drive and extends the life of the drive as there are more blocks to spread the erases over. Wear Leveling is where the controller spreads the erase/write cycles over all the physical blocks of the drive by remapping the physical blocks into various locations of the logical drive, thereby keeping all the physical blocks at approximately the same number of erase/write cycles. Lastly the blocks do degradation with erase cycles a brand new ssd should maintain data for 10 years with the power turned off. at end of life, a consumer grade drive should be able to maintain data for a year, while server grade devices I think the number is more like 3 months.
The funny thing is, that modern controllers for magnetic drives have to do a very similar procedure too due to shingled storage. So Dave is wrong on every account.
I'm 60yo & Dyslexic so I see things more widely & deeply than most & I have learned many things from you sir & I appreciate you. I frequently implement many things you reveal. Thank you, Tim
I am fascinated to learn that GRC are still around and still relevant to computing beyond the retro tech scene, shields up was a huge part of my repertoire before I had to get work outside the industry and then basically moved on from computers (beyond keeping my personal PC's alive) I believe I first used Spinrite via an acquired PC that was gifted to me for parts, I restored it and found Spinrite and ran it and was amazed at how better it was than the alternatives. the drive it was on did not last long and I lost access to that version, but it gave me the want to buy it, I never did as it was too expensive for me at the time and by the time I could afford it i was busy doing other things. this new version is nicely priced but it's Xmas and I have a wife and 6 kids to think of so I will have to wait before I get this gem for my new systems. I just love the tech deep dive you did, answering all my questions about Data loss between HDD and SSD.. thank you for that and thank you for showing that Spinrite and GRC are still around and relevant today. I have many HDD's and devices that need Spinrite so I will be getting this in the new year.
Wow! I haven't used Spinrite in a loooong time, since my days doing break-fix at a computer shop in the late 90s! It was a great utility for our shop and I'm happy to see 6.1 is available for use on current technology! Thanks for firing up that old 10MB "jet turbine engine" of a Commodore hard drive! 😊😊
Have been using spinrite for many years. There is truly no better software out there to turn a bad day into a phew we saved the data kinda day. Steve is a true gift to the computer and security world. 😊
I've been a fan of Steve Gibson since I first discovered the port scanner on his website back in 2002 which opened my eyes to why I needed a firewall on my home system.
@@saganandroid4175No... it was outing other software that was up to no good ! If there are any programmers in the world you could trust not to write buffer overflows and other exploitable problems it would be Steve. We are talking drill sergent inspecting a uniform type checking here 😂
Old school computer user here; bizarrely i had never heard of this tool before now...and sod's law has just blessed me with a backup-backup 8TB Seagate Barracuda that i randomly heard having read difficulties. Turns out it's sprinkled with bad sectors affecting old data. Time for a test i think, though i may be some time! 🇬🇧👍
I am a long time spinrite customer. I have had spin rite restore operation to a number of otherwise failed mechanical hard drives long enough to perform any needed undelete / partition restores and then get the data off the drive. I got spin rite 6.0 upgrade back in 2005 and now I have anew free version!!! Version 7.0 comes out soon (tm) and I will certainly upgrade!!!
Thanks Dave. When I received an email notice from GRC about the availability of SpinRite 6.1 I filed it away for future action. I have used SpinRite for years (not lately) to miraculously fix dead drives. I've just moved the upgrade to the top of my to-do list. I would really enjoy a chat session somewhere sometime with you and Steve G and maybe Leo L too!
Leo LaPorte?? Is he going to smear himself in mayo? But seriously, tell us about how it saved you? Did it really fix the drives or just allow you to copy the data to a new drive?
It was usually a bad spot on the disk that the normal utilities could not correct, but SpinRite's more thorough routines could repair, allowing the drive to stay in the machine and the bad file to be readable again. I mentioned Steve G and Leo L because Steve is a guy that reminds me of Dave P, someone who functions on several degrees above my level of understanding. Steve G is part of Leo L's network of regulars on his podcasts or broadcasts or however he's doing things these days.
Hiya Dave. I see that you have the new upgrade of Spinrite, provided last September. I got mine too and frankly, I was shocked. LOL I did not expect an upgrade to this old goodie. I haven't run it yet. But one thing I want to mention about these SSDs, which I'm sure that you know very well, is that they do not like Windows' constant writing logs. One one machine, within a few months, one of my SSDs went from 100% to about 68%! It was all due to the danged logs being constantly written. So for my Lab computer, I decided to do a fresh install of Windows 10, on a new SSD then to through as many logs properties as I could and change them to write to a different drive. It's an old SSD, but I may flip that to an old mechanical drive. As the logs are written using their own thread, I don't think (or hope) that they'll slow things down. So if not mentioned, I wonder if you'd be interested in doing a video to help others, showing them how to change log locations. It might even be a good idea to write a script that can go through all the logs to re-path them. And as you know, there's a mountain of logs in Windows. Sadly, all their paths are not listed in the registry, or if they are, they are perhaps hidden. I tried to search for their old paths and even portions of their paths, with the idea to do a batch change. But most logs were not in the registry. I haven't researched it yet, but I suspect that the paths are retained in some config file or other. Just a thought.
I've been using SpinRite since 1990. Saved many a HDD drives that, (at the moment) were dead at that point! Steve says SpinRite 7.x is possibly 2 years away for release. Also, 6.1 was a free upgrade from 6.0; but, (according to the sales department), it's not clear as to whether 7.x will have an upgrade cost. One things for sure, it will be amazing as to what Steve will do with 7.x !! --- It has always amazed me how small SpinRite is, yet all those graphical screens Steve put into SpinRite!
My plan for v7.0 is to charge for upgrading from v6.x since we haven't charged anything for the 20-year upgrade to v6.1. But nothing is more upsetting than buying some software that is soon after upgraded for a fee. So we'll =definitely= be providing some upgrade protection for at least three months. I expect v7.0 will be the same price, upgrading would only be $29, and it would cover the entire v7.x series, which I expect to be working on and improving over time. v7.0 will be 100% Windows hosted, so no more need to boot DOS. 👍
@@SGgrc You will get another sale from me Mr Gibson. Heck, I would have paid for 6.1 if you had asked. I do appreciate the freebie, but your time would be worth it.
OMG, my first computer was a PB 486 DX 2 with 4 megabytes memory and a 40 MB hard drive. I remember when I got my first 1GB hard drive. Good times back then.
I was just thinking about if defragging a SSD was necessary or even possible. I used to love running spinrite to defrag my old windows machine. Thanks for explaining exactly what it was/is doing as well. Was always curious exactly what the process was..
Defrag is different. Spinrite does not defrag or move data. It rather just checks all sectors can be read and written ensuring the drive is still working properly while refres the data
Rarely but sometimes necessary. Definitely possible. Windows defrag replaced it with a TRIM instruction for SSDs (not the same) so you should seek out other tools that still permit it if you are on newer versions of Windows. A refresh of data like spinrite is doing would be a reason to consider it, but you cannot guarantee a defragmenter is going to move all data and some important data is outside the filesystem; spinrite or a full bit for bit drive backup+restore would hit those unmoved files and nonfilesystem areas. Sometimes users are working with a system that cannot tolerate fragmentation like some ways of booting image files from a drive as if it was a drive itself. There are both software version of this and hardware versions of this. Tolerance for fragmentation will vary but if it is trouble then a defrag or backup+reformat+restore may be in order. Fragmentation does cause seek times which even on SSDs are slower than sequential read/write speeds. It is much less than on a magnetic but could start to add up depending on write/delete/relocate steps that are performed on files. A general desktop/laptop user should not see this as a relevant speed impact unless they are regularly emptying and filling most of their drive. Even on magnetics, most of the benefit of defragmenters was to move files to faster parts of the disk. This is not likely to matter for a SSD unless it has very uneven cell wear. spinrite or similar techniques being rarely used on a SSD would likely rebalance wear for most drive uses. The files are not relocated so it would not help a magnetic in the same way.
There are tools like Perfect Disk which claim to manipulate the data structure on SSD drive to reduce wear&tear on SSD drives however they recently went out of business and their DRM infested "activated" software refuses to run now.
Thank you for making this video. I ran into this very problem with one of my SSDs (Samsung 840 EVO) that is quite old but has regularly been powered. During a speed test, I noticed that the beginning of the drive was struggling to break 20MB/s but the performance got much better towards the middle of the drive. After a defrag analysis, it was very obvious that the LEAST fragmented parts of the drive were slowest, implying the slow files are oldest. The fragmentation and performance graphs lined up perfectly. I used Hard Disk Sentinel to do a surface refresh of the SSD, and... *BAM*... the whole drive is now running full speed throughout, and I suffered no data loss. I was under the impression that SSDs would do this refresh maintenance automatically when they are powered and struggling to read data, but... apparently not all of them do.
I remember hearing something about (possibly early) 840 SSD's having a firmware issue that would let old data rot and slow down and require a full re write to restore speed.
Lol, I've owned spinrite since Steve created it. Saved a lot of data for me over the years. Even at work on old systems. I worked in the engineering dept at a local hospital. Back in the late 2000's there were still a few systems running on MSdos. One of the boomed techs approached me because the young IT guys didn't know what to do with dos. It was an old monitoring system running on an old 286. I brought my spinrite to work and was able to rescue the data. All I had to do was rebuild the batch file that was still corrupted. It ran for another 6 months before being replaced! I still use spinrite when I find vintage laptops to restore.
Thats something I "sometimes" miss. The sound(-spektrum) of the old computer is hilarious :) . Back then you could HEAR if something is wrong with the Computer or processing XD
Old time SpinRite user, got my email from Steve and haven't downloaded version 6.1 yet ... but I will. Yes, he's a legend and his work in security is wonderful. Thanks for this video!
You may be one of the better qualified to be able to record those sounds for an archival record. And so we can listen and enjoy some lovely ASMR treats. An hour of a spinning disk working away... yes please.
Spinrite and then image the disk and copy to a new drive has saved many customer’s precious data back to before the failure, it sometimes felt like magic! I don’t do it anymore but will never forget that awesome piece of software!
AFAIR some Norton DOS tool had "revive a defective diskette" function, and did exactly the thing you talk about. Now I use linux's badblock with non-destructive write test mode. This year I revived 2 pendrives that were terribly slow being read, and one cheap SSD. They returned to full, constant read speed. But - writing whole SSD again means you add TB to TBW lifetime, so if it's near its end of life it can fail. My flashes work fine, but DO full backup BEFORE trying those tools. I do, so recovered drives that were heading the trash direction became a free bonus.
SpinRite was a prime tool in my toolbox back when I was doing PC repair in the 1990s. I was shocked when I got the email from GRC that it had been updated, and that my license was still good for the new version. But now all my data is either on RAID'd NASs or in the cloud. I'm glad the product is still going strong; maybe I'll need it again someday.
Dave, this is a most appreciated treatise. I'm a retired electronic hardware engineer and have not used this type product in many years. I guess it's easy to become complacent with the newer hardware and its perceived improved reliability. It's time I reconsidered my thinking on this. Thank you for getting into the nuts and bolts (as hardware engineers like to say). I find your explanations and topics to be very succinct and informative. I really enjoy your content. Keep it going, my friend. Cheers!
Back in the days of 80286 I used Norton Disk Doctor for trying to recover failing floppy or HD drives. Norton Utilities was quite a 'Swiss army knife' for PCs.
According to an anecdote from Steve, I think it was Norton that tried buying SpinRite from him, but he wouldn't sell it to them for any amount of money, so they basically copied his stuff without permission and sold it for at least a while.
WAIT A SECOND!!! I bought spinrite 6.0 but haven’t used it because I thought it only ran on Windows! I never got around to making a windows VM or bringing out one of my old PCs. I didn’t know it ran from the usb bypassing the OS!!! I listen to Security Now each week for years but somehow I missed this! Thank you.
I remember a large nationwide box store chain was using Spinrite extensively in their "repair squad" without a site license. I think all Steve did was make each store buy a legitimate site copy. Many expensive "repairs" done in the day for a few minutes administering the drives.
I listen to Security Now every week, have for decades. Great podcast, Steve is able to explain complex ideals/technology with ease. Him updating spinrite to 6.1 for free was also amazing. He's also supposed to be working on v7 soon
Commodore was really so far ahead so many times and yet Tramiel and Gould managed to muck things up. When you own MOS there is no reason not to stay far far ahead.
I remember using Spinrite back in the 80s to “fix” or diagnose old MFM/RLL drives, back when the controller could be accessed directly through software in DOS. I didn’t know it was still around. Modern drives have built in reallocation of bad/weak sectors and there’s more abstraction, so unless the controller/SATA interface allows direct block access I don’t know how effective Spinrite is on a modern drive. And I doubt it would help a SSD much if at all due to the abstraction and the way the controller maps and manages the NAND space. As I recall back in the old days Spinrite would read a whole track, low level format the track, and rewrite it (and do the other tests you mentioned), which helps strengthen the sector markers and also compensate for head alignment shifts over time. It would also identify bad sectors and mark them as bad so the OS wouldn’t store data on them. I remember if it detected a drive was failing badly it would start playing a “siren” sound on the PC speaker.
I am here because Steve Gibson gives you a shoutout on this week's Security Now! podcast Episode 1000. (I get the show notes in advance of the show.) I am not able to run Spinrite 6.1 on my two PowerSpec PC's (2018 Win 10 Home and 2020 Win 10 Pro) because of UEFI restrictions in the BIOS. There is no CSM option (Legacy boot) to enable, and I cannot disable UEFI. My only option right now is to wait for SpinRite 7.0 with UEFI Booting. I have used Spinrite 6.0 on older PC's, but I didn't do so very often because the run time was going to be multiple DAYS just for one drive. Spinrite 6.1 is exceedingly faster taking only hours vs days for large drives. Now if I could just run it.
i'm running it right now (started about 30 minutes ago). i've been a fan of Spinrite since the beginning. I forgot how small it is - 262 kbytes for the program.
Blast from the past? I've got it running on a drive I pulled from my ex-wife's laptop 14 years ago...wanna make sure that data doesn't go away so my kids can see it someday.
Wow! SpinRite! Just downloaded v6.1 using my original transaction code from over ten years ago. LOVE SpinRite! Am not sure how recent v6.1 is. Previously with version 6 of SpinRite Steve Gibson recommended only doing level 2 repair on a SSD, but I see you with version 6.1 running level 3 on an SSD. I remember Steve getting all caught up in SQRL and SpinRite taking a back seat for years. Am unsure whether a Mac will boot from it. He was also working on a secure disk erasure program. I have fixed a computer or two over the years using version 6.
i'll be the 501'st comment if i get there. another authistic guy from an era when/where i was fixing xt's and 286s. now i have a 400+ piece cpu collection. sometimes i make cool candles out of them, 4-core and 8-core candles, they burn faster. love your stuff, gets me back to my childhood memories.
My understanding is all spinrite does is potentially get the drive itself to trigger a reallocation, by trying to interact with it at that specific "sector", and if it fails the drive then marks it as bad, thus skipping it and then allocates part of the reserved sectors instead. Thus its always been my understanding that it isnt 'special" in this regard, and the cult following of it is largely exaggerated(partly by sysadmins who now suddenly dont see high latency as the drive tries to read a broken sector). Not to hate on it but ive had lengthy conversations about it over the decades (oh am i old hahaha) both in real life and on newsgroups.
You’re right, the product is technically simple, but there are no other tools that do this same (simple) task. In fact something like Spinrite should be provided by the hard drive manufacturers for free, but they don’t do it, as it would increase their costs. This is a niche product that only costs around 70 bucks with a lifetime license.
Interesting. I emailed GRC in 2015 asking if they were going to do anything for SSD data retention issues. The reply was they were not planning anything.
Very interesting answer thought provoking. I keep some old systems around as part of a software update preservation library I'm looking after. I do have a couple of questions though: • How often should I run something like SpinRite! on an SSD? • If I have a rarely accessed virtual machine should I run the utility on the virtual SSD drive is not easy from the host system? In other subjects your videos are very helpful in my personal autism investigation and I look forward to reading your book. Many thanks.
Spinrite - ah the memories! MFM drives were awesome for that startup sound! I ran into Steve's site way back in the day - glad to hear he's still around.
Spinrite, blast from the past. I used it all the time and ran it on all my friends computers. I knew it was needed for MFM drives, but didn't think it was needed now.
I smell something fishy about this video. I have *never* seen any spec sheet for *any* magnetic storage device which gives details about how the device can return values representing the strength of magnetic flux on any part of the drive, let alone individual bits and clusters. I've been working with magnetic storage since 1978, with industrial-scale removable hard drives as part of a setup for a Univac 90/70 mainframe. And I've tried just about every other type of magnetic device since. I would *really* like to know how "Spinrite" accesses magnetic flux values. Dave, can you show us a device spec sheet which gives tech details about how to do this? Maybe you could write a demo assembler program to return analog flux values from a digital hard drive? My guess is that you won't be able to.
And you’d be absolutely correct. Not only do hard drives not expose raw magnetic flux, the readout in a modern hard drive is astoundingly complex, involving feedback to the analog circuitry from the digital parts that try and tease out the data - that is, the actual readout amplifiers and equalizers are adjusted constantly. There is absolutely no way a single programmer could do a better job at developing a data recovery algorithm than the teams of signal processing experts at a hard drive maker do, even if computer software could control the analog readout process, which it can’t. (If you have access to academic journals, see e.g. “Hard‑disk drive read‑channel design trade‑offs for areal densities beyond 2 Tb/in2” by Tertulien Ndjountche.)
As I understand it, a modern SSDs controller abstracts storage location to wearlevel the cells. So writing data back does not inherently imply the same cell will be written to. The computer might see a certain location on the logical device for the data, but that is the SSDs controller telling it the logical location, while the controller has a internal table that tells it 'this logical data block lives in these cells on that chip' physically. And if that data were rewritten it could choose an entirely different cell block probably on a different chip, preferencing cells which are the least worn to ensure all the cells wear evenly. Shuffling data around like that on a SSD only serves to wear the cells. .....As far as I understand it.....for modern SSDs......
So glad to see SpinRite getting some love. It was always a brilliant and undervalued tool in the IT industry. Can't begin to tell you how many people I told to dump Norton Utilities and get a copy of SpinRite instead.
@@throwaway6478 Back in the day the primary use of NU was data recovery from drives. It was slow and depended largely on having it running as a background process during normal operation. SpinRite instead used the drive's native SMART features and its own diagnostics, and because it is written in machine code it's lightning fast compared to NU.
I've been a SpinRite user from V1.0. I used to buy "dead" hard drives at auction, run them through SpinRite, and was able to resell almost all of them.
Gym for the hdd. I have a dell laptop with an external SATA port to access modern 10tb+ drives with Spinrite as it does not work very well on usb drives, and gpt/uefi boot partitions. It's slow but still runs well even on 20tb drives (takes a few days). It's a great way to check old archive drives and prep new drives for nas setups. A new version 7 is expected to be released with better uefi and usb support
Dave, I have to disagree. The claim that SpinRite can measure the flux strength and background noise or the bits seem unreasonable. I can't see how a read head which is optimized for digital signals could possibly measure the analog values of the magnetization. As for needing or even using SpinRite, I handle the degradation problem by monthly cloning the SSD and hard drive and then swapping the original with the clone. Sometimes I full format before cloning. I also rotate through three SSC and HDs.
Higher end SSD's will reserve a percentage of the space to help with the ssd slowdowns and write endurance. In production environments I like to reserve an additional 10%... just for good measure.
Could you elaborate on NAS systems please. Older ones that run on some combination of RAID on, let's say, ext4 or newer ones that utilise fancier filesystems like btfrs. * does it makes sense to power off NAS, yank out each HDD and run SpinRite individually on HDDs? * does btfrs' data scrubbing do the same as SpinRite? (or is data scrubbing a Synology only thing.. 🤔) Thanks!
I am really intrigued to see so many glowing comments regarding SpinRite. As I mentioned elsewhere, fixing drives made unusable by SpinRite was a factor in my job. Unless a drive was inoperable, I never had any problems using the controller ROM’s onboard low level format routine to make a drive SpinRite had mangled work again. Despite all the fancy rhetoric in Gibson’s advertising, I believe there really is no substitute for doing a real low level format and reload. It is more hands-on to format and reload than turning SpinRite loose to do its thing. Life was simplified after Ghost came on the scene and it was easy to re-image drives from the network. Formatting and ghosting is probably quicker and I assert likely more reliable than SpinRite in most cases.
I remember waiting hours and hours for Spinrite to finish on my then HUGE 20mg Seagate MFM HDD. How long is it going to take to read and write each of the 27,344,750,580 sectors on my 14TB drive????
I literally watched Steve Gibson's video intro to Spinrite 6.1 before your video and the new feature set is intriguing. I don't own a licensed copy so I went to his familiar website, (it still looked the same since long ago,) and remembered why I didn't buy a license back when I used HDD. The price and no trial period. Over the years, I have maintained data integrity by disk cloning, backups and triplicating data onto 3 machines, including my NAS. In the past, bit rot was a major issue in FAT. I frequently defrag so I think that probably helped reduce bit rot. I still remember using PC Tools and later Norton Utilities. These days, I store important files in the cloud encrypted and have all my devices sync to it. And for HDD defrag and SSD consolidate free space, I run licensed PerfectDisk. Why don't I buy Spinrite? Well, it runs in DOS mode, needs exclusive hardware access so I doubt HyperV will work. The process takes days on terabyte HDDs and hours for SSD. If Spinrite 7 can run in Windows, then I can unmount the drive let Spinrite run for days if needed.
Thanks for the nostalgia. However given several negative comments re application to SSD would be good to have a reliable reference to an independent test of the application of Sprinrite to SSD speed and longevity
I think a shoutout to Gibson Research as a company should also be mentioned. My original purchase of SpinRite was in 2009, nearly 16 years ago. Just recently, I received an email from GRC with a code to get the newest version for free, as I was still considered a valued customer. Now THAT'S customer service!
I received the same email and it put a big smile on my face. Companies send offers, advertisements and feedback requests sometimes every day. Steve Gibson sends less than one email per decade.
I bought a hard drive/SSD boot manager called Boot-It by TeraByte in 2005, and I can still download the latest version almost 20 years later. These companies know real customer service. ;)
Same here! Good stuff!
These guys are old school serious developers. Another one is Ed Hamrick of Hamrick software (Vuescan). I think Dave should know him or meet with him. That single developer software runs on 3 different operating systems with the same quality/interface and supports/maintains 6500+ mostly undocumented scanners!
@@Olgasys - Steve also created ValiDrive which is by far the best and fastest fake SDcard/Flash drive tester. Another guy who writes some great free tools is Nirsoft.
Steve Gibson is a treasure. Who else used to check Shields UP! religiously?
I still use it as my port detector!
*Raises hand* Steve provided all kinds of cool utilities back in the day. I had no idea Spinrite was still a thing. I'm going to check it out. Lots of old spinning rust sitting on my shelves and in my systems. I wonder if it will work on those old floppies I've been hoarding since the 90's ...
Ooh, I do , I do! 🎉🎉🎉
Sadly we're still missing that IPv6 version of Sheild'sUp.
Spinrite has also saved my day many times over the years,
know loads of data recovery guys that still swear by it today!
His Perfect Password generator is awesome as well. Especially since you can get ones that max out the size of the Wi-Fi keys, for maximum security on a very limited network.
I remember discovering Steve in the 90s when I was learning assembly in college. Was blown away when i heard he used it exclusively to write all the tools on his site. As an effiency freak I immediately became a fan.
I had always-on 'broadband' beginning in 1999 and came across GRC's Shields Up utility ... wonderful tool.
Assembler is the only language that ever made sense to me. I use nothing but....
@@prscrystalized3706 Assembler is not a language, it's a program. You probably meant assembly.
@@WeaponX2007A And someone who made everything in assembly would realistically know the difference too
@@WeaponX2007A I've always called it 'programming in assembler'.
The sound of that Commodore hard drive spinning up was awesome.
Louder than my washing machine except at the final spin cycle.
Back in the day, commercial technology invoked a feeling when it started up. Things came roaring to life like a jet airliner starting its engines. It felt and sounded expensive, you didn't think you would have a few of them in your house just 2 decades later.
I had a 20MB Supra drive for my Amiga that was similar. Turning that beast on (separate power switch for the hard drive vs the computer) was like punching the throttle on the millennium falcon.
@@fensoxx The dial-up modem ruined start up sounds for me. AOL was no help either. Still remember my mother thought that AOL was the internet, the whole internet... liked they owned it and were the gatekeepers... hahaha
Nostalgia.
Steve Gibson IS a treasure. Every few years I can't find my copy of Spinrite, so I buy a new one but Steve sends me a message pointing-out that Spinrite carries a LIFETIME license. You only have to pay ONCE. Who else would do business that way?
As a Chief Technologist for Seagate for years, SpinRite is generally done right. There are some errors in Dave's presentation but they are minor. The biggest thing that needs to be said is that if you wish to retain digital data plan to keep essential data on multiple drives that do not depend on each other (RAID is not a solution except for transactional data management or in disk duplication mode), and always keep a full dated copy or two airgapped -- meaning not connected to anything electrical. Safe deposit boxes are useful for this. And plan to make new copies on new drives every few years. Digital storage devices can fail in more ways than you can count and the ones that can preserve data for decades are really not commercially available and often give a false sense of security leading to catastrophic data losses. The design life of storage devices is generally 5 years although it is not unexpected that a given device will preserve storage for 10+a few years. Knowing what i know I buy new drives every year or so and make new full copies as well as keeping at least a couple of copies airgapped all the time. Lightning can, and does, strike. Fire (heat) demagnetizes. It is not true that solid state drives are not magnetic and susceptible to failures associated with magnetic field losses. Foldermatch is a great sister product to Spinright. Don't ever trust the OS vendors. There are some data storage technologies that may change some of my comments (e.g., graphene which is relatively immune to many failure modes) and Dave comments in the future, but some other ones mentioned here and the wonders of Spinrite and Foldermatch are unlikely to ever disappear.
Also, demand self-encrypting drives under TCG storage standards, and don't trust the software guys to get the security and privacy right
I was unaware of Foldermatch. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. After reading their FAQ and description, it appears similar to WinMerge. I may try it out to see if it's any better.
Normally I use Robocopy to synchronize my backup drives, and occasionally verify integrity using WinMerge in 'binary contents' mode.
The errors are major. Shingled storage is not covered, physical storage is inaccessible behind controller's internal mapping. The whole video is harmful.
As far as long term storage….M-Disc maybe…?
my jaw dropped when I read your reply - this is totally my own personal backup strategy! And it's from a former Seagate exec too! Big thanks for your time writing this.
@@vasiliigulevich9202 "The errors are major."
Specify the major errors, then. SpinRite is smart enough to recognize SMR drives & will caution end users if there are issues. This isn't like defragging a hard drive, so saying it's "harmful" sounds way too over the top.
As a causal viewer/listerner of both Dave’s Garage and Security Now.
I had to watch this video. Security Now just reached episode 1000 and a shoutout was given to your review of spinrite!
I another person mentioed, my bought a copy of Steve Gobson's software back in 2006. I am just speechless that Steve allows for FREE updates. I remember listening to Steve on one of his podcasts back in the day when he sadly mentioned that his wife left him because it was not in him to monetize on underdeveloped software. Apparently, many software companies produce underdeveloped software so later on they could monetize on updates. I am a true follower of his amazing skills and knowledge.
He should have a tip jar so we can ask but him a beer.
BONUS points if you heard me say "helpens deepen" :-)
This was indeed very valuable info, never heard of this great software, even though I am interested in this field. Thanks!
Sad that it is a bit too expensive for a regular home user.
At 6:24 you got deepen into it.
Yeah, I heard that. Brain moving faster than mouth. Helpens to me all the time. :)
I want hear you to say "I used Chi-Writer, and hack it also!", greetings from Mexico!
Dave, That's a perfectly proper technical term! Are you bragging?
Steve Gibson is just your kind of guy: meticulous, detail and performance oriented. Old school cool! I'm listening to Steve's podcast "Security Now" since 2005. Just this week the podcast reached episode 999! Give it a listen.
Been listening since the first episode - Stupid me, should of minted some bitcoin like Steve! Knowing him - it's gone to charity.
@@paulw3182 - I'd take that charity donation. lol jk
Unfortunately the other host is a loon.
My gosh! I haven't heard the name, SpinRite, in two decades! Purchased, downloaded, and added to the toolbox. Thanks, Dave!
Steve owes you a large beer Dave. I used to listen to his security podcast back when it started. I can tell you that you (and Steve) are correct. I was in uni working on my Bsc in electrical engineering, and I used Spinrite for that job. I used a high freqency sampling scope to read the hardware voltages going to and from the head after the amplifier, and i used that experiment in my dissertation. So i can personally confirm that it does do what Steve claims. While running the test I ran an Iomega zip drive, a poorly western digital IDE drive, and a very expensive at the time seagate sata drive. That refreshed some long fading memories from my internal storage.. 😂
Steve is awesome!
Great podcasts, I tune in too once in a while. While SpinRite may be useful for older hard rives and SSD's, you can do the same by copying a drive to a second spare then back onto the first. heh
@BillAnt That might work if the drive was 100% full, if not you may still have underlying bad sectors that have yet to be used or swapped in.
@@TRS-Tech - After backing up a drive, I always run a 0xFF/0x00 fill pattern on every byte, essentially flipping every bit to 1 then back to 0. Nothing wrong with using SpinRite, but the same can be done using other free tools.
@@BillAnt How do they shut off the drives hardware and software error correction routines though, you also have the translation between the o/s and the bios to deal with. The way spirite works i believe is to actually issue commands to the microcontroller on the hard drive so you don't have that abstract data to deal with. Some areas of the drive just can't be written to via an operating system interface as that system is running on the drive or if its a secondary drive it's still being paged by the o/s and you have interpreter, the bus, memmory stack and interrupts. I suppose a good analogy would be if you were trying to clean a rug while still standing on it.
I'm curious as to what tools you use and the environment you ran them in. I dont know of any other software that could directly command the drive and control the error correction and all the other systems. Even a low level drive format from the bios is not going to find poor sectors and look at swap out tables and all the other systems in the hard drive, its really a computer system in its own right and an incredible piece of engineering.
I've been a long time GRC fan and user of Spinrite but I have to admit I haven't kept up since SSD's came on the scene. Thanks for yet another great episode.
I used Floppy Refresh to keep my 1.44's readable back in the 90's 👍
Man I've been running SpinRite on drives as one of my main tools for many years. Couldn't tell you what it was really doing until now :). Thanks Dave!
I loved Spinrite back in the day. I had an IBM XT with a 20MB hard drive at the time. I used Spinrite to suggest a better interleave for the drive and let it change it. I ended up with a 50%+ performance boost. My friends were shocked to see how quickly my system loaded game levels 🙂
I remember on my 8088, booting into DOS and a batch file to start Wiin3.1, I would turn PC on and go make a pot of coffee. It would just be opening Windoze when I returned with my cuppa coffee.
Then, I would start AOL... 😂
@@jilbertbi don't think you were running AOL on an 8088 :)
Maybe a 386...
Same here..in the late 80's I had a 286-16 with a 40MB MFM HDD , Spinrite changed the 4-1 interleave to a 1-1 interleave and WOW was a speed difference! @DavesGarage should bring Steve in for an interview.
@@jilbertb Windows 3.1 doesn't run on an 8088. It requires at least a 80286. It was Windows 3.0, that was the last version, that could be run on an 8088 in real mode. Windows 3.1 dropped real mode support and runs only in standard or enhanced mode. Standard mode uses the protected mode of an 80286. Enhanced mode uses the protected mode of an 80386. There were 16 bit protected mode versions of Netscape's browser, so it might be possible to use AOL on an 80286 in standard mode of Windows 3.x.
God, I remember the PDP-11 where they had the multi-platter hard drive in the bottom of the stack in the machine room off my office. I used to play Zork (I think it was Zork) on it in the dinner hour lol. One day the electric company screwed up ( this was in the UK and loads and loads of damage was done throughout the building as the electric cycle rate was accidentally doubled which meant things like ceiling fans doubled their speed and terminal connected to the 3033/3081 mainframes all over (we were mostly programmer/analysts) blew fuses… or did more damage… but not as bad as that poor PDP-11. The hard drive cassette literally screamed.
When the technician came out to fix it he had to replace multiple boards in the PDP-11. Poor thing was toast.
IIRC, wear leveling, garbage collection, and block reallocation by the SSD controllers is designed to perform consistent remap operations and gather data to fill each page. Unless this program interacts with a drive through the zoned name spaces system, it won't have real direct access to the pages. Instead it will be doing a full rewrite through abstraction, which doesn't guarantee the desired outcome.
yet he claimed it did so?
@@RYOkEkENhe claims a lot of things. This guys isn't who you think he is.
@@israellewis5484 Yeah if you watch all the videos it seems he wrote several versions Windows all by himself...😄
I agree with you, BUT, by rewriting every block it may not write back to the exact same physical block but it has written a 'full charge' to the rewritten blocks, and does so for every block. This seems well worth doing. I have used Hard Disk Sentinel to run a Read/Clear/Write complete run (only available in paid version) about once every 6 months. It will recover marginal cells if possible by using the SSD's built-in ECC in the process. I must have a copy of SpinRite somewhere. Must check it out again 🙂
Yes I was wondering for a while if I didn't understand something, or he was *really* suggesting just rewriting the whole SSD several friggin times. You put it nicely, with the "wear leveling, garbage collection, and block reallocation by the SSD controllers" makes it basically impossible to map logical sectors 1:1 to physical sectors.
Which makes the suggestion using this DOS tool - that is completely unaware of SSDs - quite the dumb suggestion.
But ok, if that's really the case, maybe that's how things were done at M$ by (ex) M$ engineers and that certainly explains a lot, too.
When I was at school I was assigned the task of coming into the computer room half an hour early to fire up the hard drive. I think it was 1MB and served the whole network. It took nearly half an hour to start up. It was the size of a VCR. Quite a responsibility! The workstations were some kind of Nimbus things running DOS and Windows 1 (possibly 2). Abstract memories!
I love that you made this video. I've been a computer tech (on and off) for 30 years and for most of those, SpinRite has performed miracle after miracle on HDDs and more recently SSDs. Easily the best sixty bucks I ever spent in the 90's.
Story I heard once was that Spinrite was a originally designed as a product for automatically low-level formatting ST-506 drives with the optimal interleave. If you moved a drive to a new controller/computer you could run Spinrite, re-interleave your drive and not loose any data. Remember ST-506 drives are basically just motors and op-amps. No intelligence. That was on the controller. Change the controller and it changes how data is written and read from the drive. Also the tolerances were huge back then as well. So a different controller and/or computer could really throw things off. One of the side effects was that Steve would have to attack the data from multiple angles such as seeking from outer to inner and vice versa in an attempt to read the a particular track/sector. There in Spinrite had the ability to recover data from a drive flaky drive as well. I even believe early versions of Spinrite (like 1 and 2) still had the original automatic interleave that Spinrite was based on..
This is exactly what I used Spinrite for. Whenever I got a new harddrive or swapped it to a different computer, I would use Spinrite to suggest the best interleave. Like you say, it could then change the interleave without any data loss, it was amazing. I sometimes got 50%+ performance increase on the drive.
@farab4391 it is shocking the difference it can make speed wise. Every 6 months I used to run a level 5 check and then a defrag 👍
Spinrite saved me a few times on my old platter drives. I had no idea it would work on SSDs. Thanks, I just grabbed the 6.1 version.
I remember the QEMM, NetWare divers and freeing as much of the lower 640k. Been there, done that.
12:12 I'm wondering how old your SSD would need to be, to not support TRIM (OS support is a separate issue). My boot drive in this system is a Crucial M4 purchased in 2012 and it supports TRIM. Some older SSDs might have a firmware update available to support TRIM. In some cases firmware updates will improve other aspects of data retention, so are worth investigating and installing. I remember the first Samsung 840 TLC drives had performance and data retention problems that were addressed with newer firmware. For many SSD users, a firmware update might help more than SpinRite.
Love it! I used to use SpinRite back in the late ‘80s and ‘90s on old MFM and IDE drives. I think I still have a copy on a 3-1/2 inch floppy disk somewhere….! I went ahead and grabbed a copy of 6.1 today after watching your video…I have a lot of SSDs that are starting to slow down. Version 7.0 supposedly will boot on UEFI-only machines, per Steve’s web site.
there appears to be a basic misunderstanding of how Flash Based memory works. if you read a block and rewrite the block, the ssd can't write to the block that the original data was stored in without first erasing the block. What will really happen is the ssd controller will map a different already erased physical block on the SSD to the original location on the logical drive, and write the data to that block. In the process it will mark the original block as needing to be erased so it can be erased when the drive gets time (this is what is being called garbage collection). If you repeat the process then the data is just written to a third available block and the 2nd block is marked as ready for reclaim. Trim was introduced to ensure unused blocks could be erased and be ready to be written once the OS was no longer using them, unlike spinning disk where you can just write over the old data. Trim help maintain write speeds as erasing a block then writing it takes a lot longer that just writing an already erased block.
The procedure outlined seems like a good way to consume the drives limited erase cycles per block, but doesn't really seem to add much benefit. Modern SSD controllers are already looking for degraded blocks and will re-write them (assuming the power is on). Modern SSD Blocks also have extra bits in them for error corrections purposes, have the capability to identify degraded block and will adjust thresholds in an attempt to recover data and re-write to a new block. And they are provisioned with extra blocks above the size rating of the drives, to ensure that there are always some erased blocks on hand, this also allows for some failure of blocks to occur without impacting the size of the drive and extends the life of the drive as there are more blocks to spread the erases over. Wear Leveling is where the controller spreads the erase/write cycles over all the physical blocks of the drive by remapping the physical blocks into various locations of the logical drive, thereby keeping all the physical blocks at approximately the same number of erase/write cycles.
Lastly the blocks do degradation with erase cycles a brand new ssd should maintain data for 10 years with the power turned off. at end of life, a consumer grade drive should be able to maintain data for a year, while server grade devices I think the number is more like 3 months.
For an SSD you only run it at level 2, which is a read-only mode.
@@maxstr You can do chkdsk /scan /r from Windows for free.
i have to agree with you, but i do like a good defrag.
@@maxstr why would you do this, if controller does the same thing automatically and with better knowledge of drive internals?
The funny thing is, that modern controllers for magnetic drives have to do a very similar procedure too due to shingled storage. So Dave is wrong on every account.
I find it crazy that the built in controller on a modern hard drives is faster than an entire system was in the 80s, and with ssds it's even faster
I'm 60yo & Dyslexic so I see things more widely & deeply than most & I have learned many things from you sir & I appreciate you. I frequently implement many things you reveal. Thank you, Tim
I am fascinated to learn that GRC are still around and still relevant to computing beyond the retro tech scene,
shields up was a huge part of my repertoire before I had to get work outside the industry and then basically moved on from computers (beyond keeping my personal PC's alive)
I believe I first used Spinrite via an acquired PC that was gifted to me for parts, I restored it and found Spinrite and ran it and was amazed at how better it was than the alternatives. the drive it was on did not last long and I lost access to that version, but it gave me the want to buy it, I never did as it was too expensive for me at the time and by the time I could afford it i was busy doing other things.
this new version is nicely priced but it's Xmas and I have a wife and 6 kids to think of so I will have to wait before I get this gem for my new systems.
I just love the tech deep dive you did, answering all my questions about Data loss between HDD and SSD.. thank you for that and thank you for showing that Spinrite and GRC are still around and relevant today.
I have many HDD's and devices that need Spinrite so I will be getting this in the new year.
Wow! I haven't used Spinrite in a loooong time, since my days doing break-fix at a computer shop in the late 90s! It was a great utility for our shop and I'm happy to see 6.1 is available for use on current technology!
Thanks for firing up that old 10MB "jet turbine engine" of a Commodore hard drive! 😊😊
Have been using spinrite for many years. There is truly no better software out there to turn a bad day into a phew we saved the data kinda day.
Steve is a true gift to the computer and security world. 😊
I've been a fan of Steve Gibson since I first discovered the port scanner on his website back in 2002 which opened my eyes to why I needed a firewall on my home system.
Realplayer....
After finding out wtf it was doing, we had to ban it in the office.
It was stealing our bandwidth! Along with our file info.
@@Speeddymon zonealarm needed to thank that man for all the downloads.
@@jilbertb Nothing that Steve Gibson has written steals your information. He writes software to help you prevent data from getting stolen.
@@jilbertb Tell us more? GCR port scanner was up to no good?
@@saganandroid4175No... it was outing other software that was up to no good ! If there are any programmers in the world you could trust not to write buffer overflows and other exploitable problems it would be Steve. We are talking drill sergent inspecting a uniform type checking here 😂
Old school computer user here; bizarrely i had never heard of this tool before now...and sod's law has just blessed me with a backup-backup 8TB Seagate Barracuda that i randomly heard having read difficulties. Turns out it's sprinkled with bad sectors affecting old data. Time for a test i think, though i may be some time! 🇬🇧👍
Thanks Dave. SpinRite worked wonders back in the day for bad drives.
I am a long time spinrite customer. I have had spin rite restore operation to a number of otherwise failed mechanical hard drives long enough to perform any needed undelete / partition restores and then get the data off the drive. I got spin rite 6.0 upgrade back in 2005 and now I have anew free version!!! Version 7.0 comes out soon (tm) and I will certainly upgrade!!!
Thanks Dave. When I received an email notice from GRC about the availability of SpinRite 6.1 I filed it away for future action. I have used SpinRite for years (not lately) to miraculously fix dead drives. I've just moved the upgrade to the top of my to-do list. I would really enjoy a chat session somewhere sometime with you and Steve G and maybe Leo L too!
Leo LaPorte?? Is he going to smear himself in mayo? But seriously, tell us about how it saved you? Did it really fix the drives or just allow you to copy the data to a new drive?
It was usually a bad spot on the disk that the normal utilities could not correct, but SpinRite's more thorough routines could repair, allowing the drive to stay in the machine and the bad file to be readable again. I mentioned Steve G and Leo L because Steve is a guy that reminds me of Dave P, someone who functions on several degrees above my level of understanding. Steve G is part of Leo L's network of regulars on his podcasts or broadcasts or however he's doing things these days.
Hiya Dave. I see that you have the new upgrade of Spinrite, provided last September.
I got mine too and frankly, I was shocked. LOL I did not expect an upgrade to this old goodie. I haven't run it yet.
But one thing I want to mention about these SSDs, which I'm sure that you know very well, is that they do not like Windows' constant writing logs.
One one machine, within a few months, one of my SSDs went from 100% to about 68%!
It was all due to the danged logs being constantly written.
So for my Lab computer, I decided to do a fresh install of Windows 10, on a new SSD then to through as many logs properties as I could and change them to write to a different drive.
It's an old SSD, but I may flip that to an old mechanical drive. As the logs are written using their own thread, I don't think (or hope) that they'll slow things down.
So if not mentioned, I wonder if you'd be interested in doing a video to help others, showing them how to change log locations.
It might even be a good idea to write a script that can go through all the logs to re-path them. And as you know, there's a mountain of logs in Windows.
Sadly, all their paths are not listed in the registry, or if they are, they are perhaps hidden. I tried to search for their old paths and even portions of their paths, with the idea to do a batch change. But most logs were not in the registry. I haven't researched it yet, but I suspect that the paths are retained in some config file or other.
Just a thought.
I've been using SpinRite since 1990. Saved many a HDD drives that, (at the moment) were dead at that point! Steve says SpinRite 7.x is possibly 2 years away for release. Also, 6.1 was a free upgrade from 6.0; but, (according to the sales department), it's not clear as to whether 7.x will have an upgrade cost. One things for sure, it will be amazing as to what Steve will do with 7.x !!
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It has always amazed me how small SpinRite is, yet all those graphical screens Steve put into SpinRite!
My plan for v7.0 is to charge for upgrading from v6.x since we haven't charged anything for the 20-year upgrade to v6.1. But nothing is more upsetting than buying some software that is soon after upgraded for a fee. So we'll =definitely= be providing some upgrade protection for at least three months. I expect v7.0 will be the same price, upgrading would only be $29, and it would cover the entire v7.x series, which I expect to be working on and improving over time. v7.0 will be 100% Windows hosted, so no more need to boot DOS. 👍
@@SGgrc - I have no problem being charged with this upgrade. I know you put your heart into everything you produce!
@@SGgrc You will get another sale from me Mr Gibson. Heck, I would have paid for 6.1 if you had asked. I do appreciate the freebie, but your time would be worth it.
OMG, my first computer was a PB 486 DX 2 with 4 megabytes memory and a 40 MB hard drive. I remember when I got my first 1GB hard drive. Good times back then.
I was just thinking about if defragging a SSD was necessary or even possible. I used to love running spinrite to defrag my old windows machine. Thanks for explaining exactly what it was/is doing as well. Was always curious exactly what the process was..
Defrag is different. Spinrite does not defrag or move data. It rather just checks all sectors can be read and written ensuring the drive is still working properly while refres the data
Rarely but sometimes necessary. Definitely possible. Windows defrag replaced it with a TRIM instruction for SSDs (not the same) so you should seek out other tools that still permit it if you are on newer versions of Windows.
A refresh of data like spinrite is doing would be a reason to consider it, but you cannot guarantee a defragmenter is going to move all data and some important data is outside the filesystem; spinrite or a full bit for bit drive backup+restore would hit those unmoved files and nonfilesystem areas.
Sometimes users are working with a system that cannot tolerate fragmentation like some ways of booting image files from a drive as if it was a drive itself. There are both software version of this and hardware versions of this. Tolerance for fragmentation will vary but if it is trouble then a defrag or backup+reformat+restore may be in order.
Fragmentation does cause seek times which even on SSDs are slower than sequential read/write speeds. It is much less than on a magnetic but could start to add up depending on write/delete/relocate steps that are performed on files. A general desktop/laptop user should not see this as a relevant speed impact unless they are regularly emptying and filling most of their drive.
Even on magnetics, most of the benefit of defragmenters was to move files to faster parts of the disk. This is not likely to matter for a SSD unless it has very uneven cell wear. spinrite or similar techniques being rarely used on a SSD would likely rebalance wear for most drive uses. The files are not relocated so it would not help a magnetic in the same way.
There are tools like Perfect Disk which claim to manipulate the data structure on SSD drive to reduce wear&tear on SSD drives however they recently went out of business and their DRM infested "activated" software refuses to run now.
What does "defragging an SSD" even mean?
@@herrbonk3635 such tools re-arrange the data to create larger chunks of free space to make it easier for the SSD firmware to find free space.
Thank you for making this video. I ran into this very problem with one of my SSDs (Samsung 840 EVO) that is quite old but has regularly been powered. During a speed test, I noticed that the beginning of the drive was struggling to break 20MB/s but the performance got much better towards the middle of the drive. After a defrag analysis, it was very obvious that the LEAST fragmented parts of the drive were slowest, implying the slow files are oldest. The fragmentation and performance graphs lined up perfectly.
I used Hard Disk Sentinel to do a surface refresh of the SSD, and... *BAM*... the whole drive is now running full speed throughout, and I suffered no data loss.
I was under the impression that SSDs would do this refresh maintenance automatically when they are powered and struggling to read data, but... apparently not all of them do.
I remember hearing something about (possibly early) 840 SSD's having a firmware issue that would let old data rot and slow down and require a full re write to restore speed.
Lol, I've owned spinrite since Steve created it. Saved a lot of data for me over the years. Even at work on old systems. I worked in the engineering dept at a local hospital. Back in the late 2000's there were still a few systems running on MSdos. One of the boomed techs approached me because the young IT guys didn't know what to do with dos. It was an old monitoring system running on an old 286. I brought my spinrite to work and was able to rescue the data. All I had to do was rebuild the batch file that was still corrupted. It ran for another 6 months before being replaced! I still use spinrite when I find vintage laptops to restore.
Thats something I "sometimes" miss. The sound(-spektrum) of the old computer is hilarious :) . Back then you could HEAR if something is wrong with the Computer or processing XD
I've had SpinRite since 2005!
1989 for me , I was 18~
Old time SpinRite user, got my email from Steve and haven't downloaded version 6.1 yet ... but I will. Yes, he's a legend and his work in security is wonderful. Thanks for this video!
You may be one of the better qualified to be able to record those sounds for an archival record. And so we can listen and enjoy some lovely ASMR treats. An hour of a spinning disk working away... yes please.
Spinrite and then image the disk and copy to a new drive has saved many customer’s precious data back to before the failure, it sometimes felt like magic! I don’t do it anymore but will never forget that awesome piece of software!
I'm a great fan of DNSbench and always wondered what Spinrite actually was for but never bothered checking.
Cheers Sir Dave of Garage
AFAIR some Norton DOS tool had "revive a defective diskette" function, and did exactly the thing you talk about. Now I use linux's badblock with non-destructive write test mode. This year I revived 2 pendrives that were terribly slow being read, and one cheap SSD. They returned to full, constant read speed. But - writing whole SSD again means you add TB to TBW lifetime, so if it's near its end of life it can fail. My flashes work fine, but DO full backup BEFORE trying those tools. I do, so recovered drives that were heading the trash direction became a free bonus.
SpinRite was a prime tool in my toolbox back when I was doing PC repair in the 1990s. I was shocked when I got the email from GRC that it had been updated, and that my license was still good for the new version. But now all my data is either on RAID'd NASs or in the cloud. I'm glad the product is still going strong; maybe I'll need it again someday.
Dave, this is a most appreciated treatise. I'm a retired electronic hardware engineer and have not used this type product in many years. I guess it's easy to become complacent with the newer hardware and its perceived improved reliability. It's time I reconsidered my thinking on this. Thank you for getting into the nuts and bolts (as hardware engineers like to say). I find your explanations and topics to be very succinct and informative. I really enjoy your content. Keep it going, my friend. Cheers!
Back in the days of 80286 I used Norton Disk Doctor for trying to recover failing floppy or HD drives. Norton Utilities was quite a 'Swiss army knife' for PCs.
Same. Quick Unerase saved my bacon when I accidentally erased all the files on a dBase III diskette.
According to an anecdote from Steve, I think it was Norton that tried buying SpinRite from him, but he wouldn't sell it to them for any amount of money, so they basically copied his stuff without permission and sold it for at least a while.
WAIT A SECOND!!! I bought spinrite 6.0 but haven’t used it because I thought it only ran on Windows! I never got around to making a windows VM or bringing out one of my old PCs. I didn’t know it ran from the usb bypassing the OS!!! I listen to Security Now each week for years but somehow I missed this! Thank you.
Thanks Dave. I've got a few older drives that definitely need this kind of love!
I remember a large nationwide box store chain was using Spinrite extensively in their "repair squad" without a site license. I think all Steve did was make each store buy a legitimate site copy. Many expensive "repairs" done in the day for a few minutes administering the drives.
Level 2 was often all it took to bring a drive back enough to get the data off !
I listen to Security Now every week, have for decades. Great podcast, Steve is able to explain complex ideals/technology with ease.
Him updating spinrite to 6.1 for free was also amazing. He's also supposed to be working on v7 soon
That Commodore HD was music to my ears. Great vid as usual.
Commodore was really so far ahead so many times and yet Tramiel and Gould managed to muck things up. When you own MOS there is no reason not to stay far far ahead.
I remember using Spinrite back in the 80s to “fix” or diagnose old MFM/RLL drives, back when the controller could be accessed directly through software in DOS. I didn’t know it was still around. Modern drives have built in reallocation of bad/weak sectors and there’s more abstraction, so unless the controller/SATA interface allows direct block access I don’t know how effective Spinrite is on a modern drive. And I doubt it would help a SSD much if at all due to the abstraction and the way the controller maps and manages the NAND space.
As I recall back in the old days Spinrite would read a whole track, low level format the track, and rewrite it (and do the other tests you mentioned), which helps strengthen the sector markers and also compensate for head alignment shifts over time. It would also identify bad sectors and mark them as bad so the OS wouldn’t store data on them. I remember if it detected a drive was failing badly it would start playing a “siren” sound on the PC speaker.
Awesome video, Dave. I was introduced to Steve Gibson ten or so years ago with SpinRite 5.
I am here because Steve Gibson gives you a shoutout on this week's Security Now! podcast Episode 1000. (I get the show notes in advance of the show.)
I am not able to run Spinrite 6.1 on my two PowerSpec PC's (2018 Win 10 Home and 2020 Win 10 Pro) because of UEFI restrictions in the BIOS. There is no CSM option (Legacy boot) to enable, and I cannot disable UEFI. My only option right now is to wait for SpinRite 7.0 with UEFI Booting. I have used Spinrite 6.0 on older PC's, but I didn't do so very often because the run time was going to be multiple DAYS just for one drive. Spinrite 6.1 is exceedingly faster taking only hours vs days for large drives. Now if I could just run it.
Oh the trip down memory lane with the D9090. That sound will forever be ingrained in my head. I miss my commodores.
Great that you explained this tool to be a true masterpiece when some other youtubers suspected it was a fraud.
1:23 LOL that spinup sounds like a jet engine rotating for ignition...lol
Feels like something the hard drive control or OS should be doing on it's own.
i'm running it right now (started about 30 minutes ago). i've been a fan of Spinrite since the beginning. I forgot how small it is - 262 kbytes for the program.
Very interesting. I have used Spinrite for many MANY years. Steve Gibson is an assembly coding beast. Great video!
SPINRITE!! Love Steve Gibson!
Oh, the SpinRite. What a blast from the past! :)
Blast from the past? I've got it running on a drive I pulled from my ex-wife's laptop 14 years ago...wanna make sure that data doesn't go away so my kids can see it someday.
Dave - Interview!!! Did I mention you should interview Steve! That would be awesome!!!
Wow! SpinRite! Just downloaded v6.1 using my original transaction code from over ten years ago. LOVE SpinRite! Am not sure how recent v6.1 is. Previously with version 6 of SpinRite Steve Gibson recommended only doing level 2 repair on a SSD, but I see you with version 6.1 running level 3 on an SSD. I remember Steve getting all caught up in SQRL and SpinRite taking a back seat for years. Am unsure whether a Mac will boot from it. He was also working on a secure disk erasure program. I have fixed a computer or two over the years using version 6.
i'll be the 501'st comment if i get there. another authistic guy from an era when/where i was fixing xt's and 286s. now i have a 400+ piece cpu collection. sometimes i make cool candles out of them, 4-core and 8-core candles, they burn faster.
love your stuff, gets me back to my childhood memories.
That's a lot of CPUs! Pretty cool.
My understanding is all spinrite does is potentially get the drive itself to trigger a reallocation, by trying to interact with it at that specific "sector", and if it fails the drive then marks it as bad, thus skipping it and then allocates part of the reserved sectors instead.
Thus its always been my understanding that it isnt 'special" in this regard, and the cult following of it is largely exaggerated(partly by sysadmins who now suddenly dont see high latency as the drive tries to read a broken sector).
Not to hate on it but ive had lengthy conversations about it over the decades (oh am i old hahaha) both in real life and on newsgroups.
You’re right, the product is technically simple, but there are no other tools that do this same (simple) task. In fact something like Spinrite should be provided by the hard drive manufacturers for free, but they don’t do it, as it would increase their costs. This is a niche product that only costs around 70 bucks with a lifetime license.
Hey Dave, can I ask where you got the double helix floor lamp? That's really cool!
An interview with Steve would be cool.
OMG! As an antique I remember using SpinRite years ago! Thanks.
GRC has been with us since the start of the internet, happy to know they are still relevant
It isn't though.
Interesting. I emailed GRC in 2015 asking if they were going to do anything for SSD data retention issues. The reply was they were not planning anything.
Funny coincidence that Steve Gibson just put out a SpinRite walkthrough video 2 days ago. Used to use this a LONG time ago, and it did a decent job.
Ditto, the good old days. Software used to feel more *real* back then, maybe because it crashed all the time 😂
Very interesting answer thought provoking. I keep some old systems around as part of a software update preservation library I'm looking after. I do have a couple of questions though:
• How often should I run something like SpinRite! on an SSD?
• If I have a rarely accessed virtual machine should I run the utility on the virtual SSD drive is not easy from the host system?
In other subjects your videos are very helpful in my personal autism investigation and I look forward to reading your book. Many thanks.
Spinrite - ah the memories! MFM drives were awesome for that startup sound! I ran into Steve's site way back in the day - glad to hear he's still around.
Spinrite, blast from the past. I used it all the time and ran it on all my friends computers. I knew it was needed for MFM drives, but didn't think it was needed now.
I smell something fishy about this video. I have *never* seen any spec sheet for *any* magnetic storage device which gives details about how the device can return values representing the strength of magnetic flux on any part of the drive, let alone individual bits and clusters. I've been working with magnetic storage since 1978, with industrial-scale removable hard drives as part of a setup for a Univac 90/70 mainframe. And I've tried just about every other type of magnetic device since.
I would *really* like to know how "Spinrite" accesses magnetic flux values. Dave, can you show us a device spec sheet which gives tech details about how to do this? Maybe you could write a demo assembler program to return analog flux values from a digital hard drive? My guess is that you won't be able to.
And you’d be absolutely correct. Not only do hard drives not expose raw magnetic flux, the readout in a modern hard drive is astoundingly complex, involving feedback to the analog circuitry from the digital parts that try and tease out the data - that is, the actual readout amplifiers and equalizers are adjusted constantly. There is absolutely no way a single programmer could do a better job at developing a data recovery algorithm than the teams of signal processing experts at a hard drive maker do, even if computer software could control the analog readout process, which it can’t. (If you have access to academic journals, see e.g. “Hard‑disk drive read‑channel design trade‑offs for areal densities beyond 2 Tb/in2” by Tertulien Ndjountche.)
Holy crap, SpinRite brought back memories of my childhood. My high school computer programming teacher ran this.
How appropriate for this video to come out on the day of Security Now episode 999.
As I understand it, a modern SSDs controller abstracts storage location to wearlevel the cells. So writing data back does not inherently imply the same cell will be written to. The computer might see a certain location on the logical device for the data, but that is the SSDs controller telling it the logical location, while the controller has a internal table that tells it 'this logical data block lives in these cells on that chip' physically. And if that data were rewritten it could choose an entirely different cell block probably on a different chip, preferencing cells which are the least worn to ensure all the cells wear evenly. Shuffling data around like that on a SSD only serves to wear the cells.
.....As far as I understand it.....for modern SSDs......
So glad to see SpinRite getting some love. It was always a brilliant and undervalued tool in the IT industry. Can't begin to tell you how many people I told to dump Norton Utilities and get a copy of SpinRite instead.
He's a grifter making irrelevant software
Why would you do that? The Venn diagram of NU and SR doesn't have a lot of overlap.
@@throwaway6478 Back in the day the primary use of NU was data recovery from drives. It was slow and depended largely on having it running as a background process during normal operation. SpinRite instead used the drive's native SMART features and its own diagnostics, and because it is written in machine code it's lightning fast compared to NU.
Man, the sound of that Commodore drive spinning up sure brought back some memories.
I've been a SpinRite user from V1.0. I used to buy "dead" hard drives at auction, run them through SpinRite, and was able to resell almost all of them.
Funny thing is, you didn't need spinrite. Free software can do the same thing.
@@tacticalcenter8658What free software was available back then?
@@johnniequinn3215 some people don't understand that some of us have been using PCs since the 80s 🙂
Linux
Unix Prior
Gym for the hdd. I have a dell laptop with an external SATA port to access modern 10tb+ drives with Spinrite as it does not work very well on usb drives, and gpt/uefi boot partitions. It's slow but still runs well even on 20tb drives (takes a few days). It's a great way to check old archive drives and prep new drives for nas setups. A new version 7 is expected to be released with better uefi and usb support
Great video Dave and as always very educational. Thank you for your time for making all these videos.
ST225 is what I had for some time ... Still being used Today for Sound effects - the Beep-beep from the Step motor for the Heads
Dave, I have to disagree. The claim that SpinRite can measure the flux strength and background noise or the bits seem unreasonable. I can't see how a read head which is optimized for digital signals could possibly measure the analog values of the magnetization. As for needing or even using SpinRite, I handle the degradation problem by monthly cloning the SSD and hard drive and then swapping the original with the clone. Sometimes I full format before cloning. I also rotate through three SSC and HDs.
Agree. What it claims to do is physically impossible.
Would the controller even be able to forward these data to a software?
The controller would need to operate in some kind of analog passtrough mode.
Higher end SSD's will reserve a percentage of the space to help with the ssd slowdowns and write endurance. In production environments I like to reserve an additional 10%... just for good measure.
One of the best tools in your support tool box.
Could you elaborate on NAS systems please. Older ones that run on some combination of RAID on, let's say, ext4 or newer ones that utilise fancier filesystems like btfrs.
* does it makes sense to power off NAS, yank out each HDD and run SpinRite individually on HDDs?
* does btfrs' data scrubbing do the same as SpinRite? (or is data scrubbing a Synology only thing.. 🤔)
Thanks!
have your computer on a UPS while using this
Yeah, and put a big sign on the computer "DO NOT TOUCH" while SpinRite was doing its thing. Good memories.
I am really intrigued to see so many glowing comments regarding SpinRite. As I mentioned elsewhere, fixing drives made unusable by SpinRite was a factor in my job. Unless a drive was inoperable, I never had any problems using the controller ROM’s onboard low level format routine to make a drive SpinRite had mangled work again. Despite all the fancy rhetoric in Gibson’s advertising, I believe there really is no substitute for doing a real low level format and reload. It is more hands-on to format and reload than turning SpinRite loose to do its thing. Life was simplified after Ghost came on the scene and it was easy to re-image drives from the network. Formatting and ghosting is probably quicker and I assert likely more reliable than SpinRite in most cases.
And all the rest of the time as well.
I remember waiting hours and hours for Spinrite to finish on my then HUGE 20mg Seagate MFM HDD. How long is it going to take to read and write each of the 27,344,750,580 sectors on my 14TB drive????
I literally watched Steve Gibson's video intro to Spinrite 6.1 before your video and the new feature set is intriguing. I don't own a licensed copy so I went to his familiar website, (it still looked the same since long ago,) and remembered why I didn't buy a license back when I used HDD. The price and no trial period.
Over the years, I have maintained data integrity by disk cloning, backups and triplicating data onto 3 machines, including my NAS. In the past, bit rot was a major issue in FAT. I frequently defrag so I think that probably helped reduce bit rot. I still remember using PC Tools and later Norton Utilities.
These days, I store important files in the cloud encrypted and have all my devices sync to it. And for HDD defrag and SSD consolidate free space, I run licensed PerfectDisk.
Why don't I buy Spinrite? Well, it runs in DOS mode, needs exclusive hardware access so I doubt HyperV will work. The process takes days on terabyte HDDs and hours for SSD. If Spinrite 7 can run in Windows, then I can unmount the drive let Spinrite run for days if needed.
The recently released version 6.1 is much faster for magnetic drives, and flies through solid state drives.
It *does work* within virtual machines.
@@Trevellian looking forward to Spinrite 7 for the Windows support.
i've used GRC tools for years! was great to hear his tool highlighted here.
Thanks for the nostalgia. However given several negative comments re application to SSD would be good to have a reliable reference to an independent test of the application of Sprinrite to SSD speed and longevity
If Steve Gibson says it works, I'll take his word for it.