[HN Gopher] GRC SpinRite
___________________________________________________________________
GRC SpinRite
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 116 points
Date : 2024-05-26 00:54 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (computer.rip)
(TXT) w3m dump (computer.rip)
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| > One time I had two NVMe drives in two different machines do
| this to me the same week.
|
| I had been buying silicon power drives and they all failed
| prematurely (9 months at the longest). I switched to Samsungs and
| never had a single drive fail in years now.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| The cheap Samsung enterprise m.2 drives you see on eBay have
| been trouble for me and others. The things have a tendency to
| suddenly fail with the firmware version displaying as
| "ERRORMOD" (error mode) and only showing 1GB of unusable space.
| They can potentially be put back into a usable state, but it's
| 100% data loss when you see that message.
|
| Samsung's consumer and enterprise SSD departments were (unsure
| if still true) basically separate entities that didn't talk
| with each other, which was further confused and compounded by
| the OEM customized firmware nonsense which results in a lot of
| great hardware essentially having buggy firmware with no fixes.
|
| I believe their very latest (non OEM) enterprise m.2 drives
| have streamlined the availability of updating the firmware, so
| the problem is seemingly less for those.
|
| For the silicon power drives, if they just suddenly stopped
| showing up, then you may try doing a power cycle to see if that
| brings them back: https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
|
| I've had Intel and consumer Samsung drives I've brought back
| with power cycling. Older NVMe Drives seem especially prone to
| becoming unresponsive in older NVMe enclosures. Seems like less
| of an issue these days though.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I would never trust a drive bought on eBay or Amazon unless I
| could verify the specific seller. There are a lot of Samsung
| fakes out there.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| The silicon power drives all went read-only. Power cycling
| never brought them back, and they had various levels of lost.
| It was clear at least one chip failed and the drive was doing
| it's best to at least let me recover what I could off of it,
| but given how many went this way, I just gave up entirely on
| the brand.
|
| I've only bought the pro level of the Samsung consumer drives
| (nvme m.2) and they've been stellar. I have no experience
| with their enterprise drives. I also wouldn't buy drives off
| of eBay. I don't think of eBay as cheaper than
| amazon/b&h/etc, and the risk of a fake is just so much higher
| on eBay.
| bigB wrote:
| Im guessing the author of this has somewhat of an issue with
| Steve Gibson and GRC, and has obviously spent some time mulling
| over how to write a very wordy and seemingly in-depth bashing of
| the their Spinrite software. However if you like myself have seen
| it work, and actually take a previously unusable hard drive to a
| usable state to allow a successful recovery of data, or in recent
| times, take an SSD with poor performing read and write speeds to
| a significant improvement after running Spinrite on the drive,
| you will be able to skip much of the diatribe in this post and
| actually see that it more of a character assassination on GRC and
| Gibson himself. Is the software 100% guaranteed to work, nope and
| I probably wouldn't recommend it for critical enterprise data
| recovery if you have the budget to spend on commercial recovery
| services, but as a low price maintenance tool it works well for
| many. The Author of this posts seems pretty knowledgeable, and
| probably has alot of offer, which is why its a pity his ego and
| spiteful nature seeps into his writing.
| wmf wrote:
| Has Gibson ever explained how SpinRite works? Many people won't
| believe in magic even if it works.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Listen to the "Security Now" podcast. He explains how
| SpinRite works every 3rd or 4th episode, with testimonials on
| every show.
|
| He seems open minded and mostly harmless, both in his tool
| (which I find works better than free alternatives), and in
| his armchair security analysis. Sometimes though he oddly
| contradicts his own best practices, like nearly blind faith
| in LastPass for years based on (IIRC) a white paper and the
| early execs being very chummy and accessible. Thankfully the
| audience calls out the questionable stuff.
| naikrovek wrote:
| The podcast is called "Security Now" but what it should be
| called is "privacy now" because Mr. Gibson fails to
| understand a lot of contemporary security problems yet is
| quite sure that Windows collecting telemetry is the most
| severe problem on the planet today.
|
| unless you use his software to fix it, that is.
|
| Every episode having a 15-minute commercial for spinrite
| (via testimonials which all sound like they were written by
| the exact same person) should be more than enough for
| anyone to start to question the guy.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| I didn't listen to that show for a while now; but it
| seemed that it was the only show out there that explained
| in details computer security news. I remember him
| explaining the speculative execution exploits when they
| first appeared really well when they first appeared. Does
| the people I know who works on blue and red teams listen
| to him? No, they already know that stuff, and yeah he
| could be more up to date, but he does his researc, does
| his homework and is a great pedagogue.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > he does his research, does his homework
|
| Is that why he ran Windows XP unpatched as his primary
| computer because "it's fine, this is all I need; I have a
| firewall, nothing can get in."
|
| That is not the behavior of a security expert.
|
| If you don't know why that is bad, you do not understand
| entire classes of attack, today.
| userbinator wrote:
| That is the behaviour of a security expert who isn't
| afraid to challenge the dogma perpetuated by Big Tech.
| LeoNatan25 wrote:
| To all the downvoters, this is sarcasm.
| Gormo wrote:
| If he has implemented mitigations for all of the
| applicable risks of the software he's using, how is that
| "not the behavior of a security expert".
|
| To my mind, a security expert is someone who understands
| the functional details of specific vulnerabilities, and
| explains how to mitigate them, not someone who makes
| vague, cargo-culty judgments about entire applications or
| OSes.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| He was browsing the web, that's pretty high risk. And
| sticking to reputable sites isn't enough when their ads
| could contain malware. While it sounds like he doesn't
| use XP anymore, (IIRC) he was using it for the Internet
| well beyond its EOL.
|
| He also admitted to having trouble getting his dev
| environment working on newer OS's. My guess is he was
| rationalizing the choice to stick with XP to avoid the
| friction of upgrading development tools. Which is odd
| since he's not afraid to delay things for years and
| ultimately has upgraded his environments anyway.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| He has had some very fun episodes over the years. Blue
| pill back in the Vista days blew my mind.
|
| Another episode: "Blue Keep", had me calling everyone I
| knew in charge of Windows Domains, with many thanks
| coming back my way because it was a pretty big deal to
| get patched on unsupported systems.
|
| I highly recommend the weekly podcast.
| 8372049 wrote:
| If you think of Steve Gibson as more of a technical minded
| journalist and less of a "security expert", then the show
| is very enjoyable. There's a lot less grave errors now than
| there used to be, his voice is pleasant and he usually
| covers relevant and interesting news.
| bigB wrote:
| There is in depth information on its workings, on the website
| itself, in the newsgroups and in the podcast. If the author
| of the article were to look it would remove any "magic" of
| its workings. The author apparently has an axe to grind, for
| whatever reason , having said that , it may be for a very
| good reason but for transparency sake this should be included
| in the article. Instead its just a weird ramble about what he
| thinks of other tools and that he thinks Spinrite is a "scam"
| without technically explaining why, boiling it down to
| essentially a technically worded opinion piece.
| johnkizer wrote:
| The in-depth information on the website appears to be this
| link:
|
| https://www.grc.com/files/technote.pdf
|
| Which, while not directly dated in the content of the
| document, references a "screaming Pentium II 333 MHz",
| which would theoretically put it ~1998. Is the claim that
| operating at a "low level" on hard drives in 1998 is the
| same as in 2024?
| jjeaff wrote:
| the simplest explanation for what spinrite does that I
| have heard is that on spinning rust drives, it simply
| tries to access the same bad data over and over until it
| finally (sometimes) gets a result. which makes sense that
| it would work (sometimes) because hard drives that are
| going bad tend to do so intermittently.
| Hakkin wrote:
| This is more or less also what (GNU) ddrescue does[0]. It
| first tries to do a linear copy of the full disk,
| skipping any errors, then goes back and tries to re-read
| the error sectors until you either cancel or it succeeds.
| It also keeps track of everything it's doing so you can
| stop and start the process without it redoing work.
|
| [0]https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_
| manual...
| TeeMassive wrote:
| This is what I was about to say. I've used it some drives and
| it worked 4 out of 5 times for drives that I had given up all
| hopes for.
|
| These hit piece articles are all the same: very well contrived
| phrases that stops short of making definitive statements and
| overly rely on the reader making assumptions as a mean to avoid
| libel lawsuits.
| johnkizer wrote:
| This article didn't read like character assassination to me,
| personally - most of the time spent on GRC/SpinRite (after the
| overall topic of disk recovery is introduced) seems to be
| either observations about Gibson's style with which I think
| many would agree - e.g.
|
| "It doesn't help that Steve Gibson's writing is pervaded by a
| certain sort of... hucksterism. A sort of ceaseless self-
| promotion that internet users associate mostly with travel
| influencers selling courses about how to make money as a travel
| influencer."
|
| Or substantive critical points about the software, e.g.:
|
| "This gives the flavor of the central problem with SpinRite: it
| claims to perform sophisticated analysis at a very low level of
| the drive's operation, but it claims to do that with hard
| drives that intentionally abstract away all of their low level
| details."
|
| And I think it's fair to ask someone who is selling a piece of
| software for $89 to provide some backing for their claims
| beyond ones that would only pertain to largely-obsolete
| hardware.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I think you are dead on. I recall -- perhaps incorrectly --
| that Gibson has been just silly amounts of incorrect on some
| things, but SpinRite itself, I've never heard anything but
| "... and then everything worked like a minor miracle." And
| you're correct, Gibson has a certain, uh, Wolfram-y habit of
| selling himself whenever possible, which doesn't help
| matters, but I hope people can manage to separate the
| personality from the product.
| Gormo wrote:
| > Wolfram-y
|
| Wolfram has already gone from alpha all the way to upsilon?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Did you try anything else on those drives first? Just reading
| or reading then writing an entire drive could do a lot to
| smooth out flaky sectors.
| pdonis wrote:
| If you want an even less flattering portrayal of Steve Gibson,
| try this:
|
| https://radsoft.net/news/roundups/grc/
|
| Previously discussed here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3890168
| jkhanlar wrote:
| "I feel" are the first two words, therefore it is opinion
| article, the kind of opinion that does not stick to the facts,
| and rewards opinionated hivemind consent manufacturing. I
| stopped reading after those two words cuz it's dangerous
| signaling of ideologies in my nonfactual nonobjective opinion.
| 8372049 wrote:
| For reference, the rest of the sentence is:
|
| _[I feel] like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time
| dealing with suspect hard drives._
| fragmede wrote:
| I feel that jkhanlar's still going to read the rest of this
| comment where I call that behavior short sighted and stupid
| even though they said they wouldn't, because I also started
| my comment with "I feel". But the problem is, not only did
| they stop reading there, but they felt it necessary to inform
| the rest of us about it. Which only makes them look even more
| like an idiot. Thankfully, by applying their own logic to
| their post, and halting reading of their comment after the
| first two words, which are also "I feel", we can save
| ourselves the trouble. Unfortunately, we don't know to stop
| there unless we've read the comment, so we're stuck in a
| paradox.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| My issue with Steve Gibson is that he spews technobabble,
| exploiting the delta between "stuff people who work at drive
| manufacturers know" and "stuff computer users, even highly
| educated ones, know about how hard drives work", in order to
| sell what basically amounts to a commercial version of
| badblocks with a bunch of fancy graphical animations.
|
| Spinrite kinda worked back in the days of MFM drives where they
| had to be low-level formatted with sector track information the
| controller then uses to figure out where the head is on the
| drive, and that sector information is refreshed during writes.
| But it was still quasi-snake oil, using a lot of mumbojumbo to
| say "I just note the original value of a sector, write it a
| zillion times, and then move to the next. This causes the MFM
| controller to refresh the sector tracks." Yes, those drives did
| benefit from low-level formats done in the condition the drive
| would be operated in - with that particular controller, at that
| temperature range.
|
| He claimed that spinrite could detect not just whether a
| particular bit was a 0 or 1, but get the analog value directly
| from the drive by "bypassing" the BIOS to talk to the
| controller directly. And Spinrite used to have an ASCII "graph
| showing these supposed values.
|
| Post MFM - IDE, SCSI, SATA, FC, etc - controllers are built-in
| to the drive, and low level formatting was handled by the
| drive's controller itself. The drive is sent a low-level format
| command. Gibson might have still had some claim to legitimacy
| left there.
|
| But then...drives shifted to using servo tracks written at the
| factory. The drive itself is physically incapable of doing
| anything to those servo tracks, and if you degauss the drive,
| you permanently destroy the drive because the servo tracks are
| wiped. The drive certainly doesn't expose via its IDE/SATA/SCSI
| interface any of the super-duper-low-level stuff he continued
| to claim to be accessing.
|
| He kept spewing the same nonsense...that his utility would
| boost the strength of the analog 'signal' on the drive by
| writing it a whole bunch.
|
| People who worked at drive manufacturers tried to work with
| Gibson because they were under the impression that he simply
| hadn't kept up with changes in hard drive technology, when the
| reality was (probably) that his product was snake oil and he
| knew it, or he was deluding himself. Example:
| https://radsoft.net/news/roundups/grc/20060123,00.shtml
|
| Any value Spinrite has is achieved via simply trying to read
| the same data over and over. If there's a failing block, the
| drive will remap it, and boom, your not-quite-fully-failed
| drive is "working" again. Huzzah! Except...y _ou can do the
| exact same thing by simply running badblocks_ - free and open
| source - or if you 're trying to recover data, use ddrescue or
| one of its variants, also all open source. It's basically a
| "dd" that doesn't give up - hoping that the drive might
| successfully read a particular area if you try enough. The
| better variants use a binary search to try and get every
| possible sector. I've used it, and it works well - I've had
| drives where I was able to get everything except well less than
| 1MB worth of data, if you gave it enough time to run.
|
| These days he's even claiming that Spinrite can improve SSD
| performance by repeatedly reading/writing data, which is
| absurd. All that is happening is Spinrite is a)wearing out the
| flash and b)maybe influencing what drive sectors are migrated
| to the SSD's SLC cache (most drives use an area of flash
| configured as SLC as a cache for reads/writes because it's
| significantly faster and more wear tolerant than areas
| configured as MLC, TLD, or QLC.) As a flash cell's electrical
| charge is reduced with each read, flash controllers
| _automatically_ refresh a flash cell when necessary when a
| sector is read.
| ikiris wrote:
| Thank you for being the voice of reason in this... mess of a
| thread
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| >... take an SSD with poor performing read and write speeds to
| a significant improvement after running Spinrite on the drive.
|
| I really can't tell if this is serious or irony. A HDD de-
| cluster algo that improves SSD speed... how clever!
| ValentineC wrote:
| Many years ago, I made the mistake of using SpinRite once to try
| and recover a hard disk failing with bad sectors.
|
| It was only through the process that I realised that instead of
| letting the hard disk run and get worse, I should have instead
| tried to image off all the data ASAP with ddrescue.
|
| That was a very dear lesson in data loss.
| BrianGragg wrote:
| It usually gives you a very large warning that a drive is about
| to physically fail and advises you to try and backup the data
| if you haven't already.
| pessimizer wrote:
| But if you already knew the drive was damaged, why push it to
| the point when you can't possibly have the time to image it,
| which will take forever? Feels like advising somebody to push
| through their asthma until they're about to lose
| consciousness.
| Springtime wrote:
| _> I should have instead tried to image off all the data ASAP
| with ddrescue._
|
| It's interesting since for those familiar with the claims of
| SpinRite and how 'it'll keep working as long as it takes to
| read a bad sector' (a key part of its promotion) ddrescue can
| do the same thing (and resume where it left off) but unlike
| SpinRite it's simultaneously making an image of the drive as it
| does so.
| userbinator wrote:
| I haven't RE'd SpinRite myself, but I remember reading from some
| others who did and concluded that it was basically very similar
| to ddrescue's algorithm, but with some additional use of "read
| uncorrected" commands and statistical analysis. The latter is
| implemented by other DR software too:
|
| https://www.deepspar.com/blog/Read-Ignoring-ECC.html
| aappleby wrote:
| The original SpinRite was a lifesaver back in the days of 100 meg
| magnetic disks, I paid for a copy and used it to resurrect both
| my own and my friends' hard drives a few times. It was indeed
| able to (usually) recover bad sectors that the OS refused to fix.
| solarpunk wrote:
| https://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/steve_gibson/
|
| https://radsoft.net/news/roundups/grc/
|
| https://radsoft.net/news/roundups/grc/20060123,00.shtml
| sircastor wrote:
| These get trotted out every time Gibson is mentioned in any
| capacity. For the most part, this stuff is 2+ decades old. It
| feels like character assassination because it's written
| exclusively as "debunking" or calling out Gibson's missteps. It
| makes no effort to followup and state if he's corrected
| himself, changed his opinion or shared further information.
| These folks have it out for this guy - whether or not he's
| wrong.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Indeed, would not love to see my list of mistakes over the
| decades, especially putting on a live show. The perfect-
| forward-podcast will not ever exist.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| It's two decades old, but so is the stuff on his site.
|
| Go look at Shields Up - it's all written like people are
| still plugging their computers directly into their DSL modems
| and cablemodems. I couldn't find a single acknowledgement
| that his service isn't necessary for 99% of users on the
| internet who are behind a NAT router. Nor does he acknowledge
| that most ISP's have long since adopted policies of blocking
| traffic on common windows network service port numbers.
|
| Anyone behind a NAT router doesn't need to worry about any of
| this unless they've modified its configuration to forward
| some ports.
|
| He's also now hawking spinrite for people with SSDs, claiming
| it helps their reliability. It's complete nonsense.
| filchermcurr wrote:
| For what it's worth, the FAQ has a section about NAT. If
| you click on 'Help' it also specifically mentions the use
| case of: "... checking and verifying your NAT router's WAN-
| side security..."
| epcoa wrote:
| Bullshit. You can go to the GRC website and forums to see
| that he has never changed his opinion on the snake oil of
| Spinrite for modern drives. And the very fact that he
| continues to sell something with claims that cannot possibly
| be true for modern (past 30 years) hard drives (not to
| mention SSDs) is alone enough evidence.
|
| I cannot read his mind. But my guess is that he actually
| believes a lot of the nonsense he is spouting, it isn't
| malice. That doesn't make him any less of a crackpot though.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| SpinRite saved my bacon a couple of times, many moons ago.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| FYI, if your SSD suddenly stops showing up (especially after a
| power off event), then the first thing to try is power cycling
| it: https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
| userbinator wrote:
| That's basically "let the firmware try to sort itself out",
| which might work if there was temporary corruption in the FTL
| metadata and it knows enough to try to recover that by doing
| some sort of block-scanning, but if there's further damage
| beyond that, it won't have any effect. Still worth a try,
| however.
| rep_lodsb wrote:
| I had an SSD go bad in another way, with requests constantly
| timing out or returning corrupt data. That started happening
| more and more frequently, with the system crashing, and after
| rebooting fsck would show tons of "fun" messages about some
| file or another being 141831373107584798 bytes large with a
| modify date years in the future. Managed to get most of the
| files off to an external hard drive, put the dead one in a
| drawer and forgot about it.
|
| When I recently read about this trick, I figured it couldn't do
| any harm even if it didn't solve this specific problem - it
| didn't, and by now the drive failed pretty much immediately
| when trying to read anything.
|
| But that got me trying other things, and what appears to have
| solved it is using the "hdparm" utility on a Linux install CD
| to send trim commands for every single sector - pretty much the
| closest thing to a "low level format" you can get today, AFAIK.
| For some reason, even with all the confirmation options it
| demands for safety reasons ("--please-destroy-my-drive"), it
| will only let you do 65535 at a time, so this required a script
| to feed it many separate ranges covering the entire space.
|
| Ended up with a seemingly perfectly usable blank drive.
| Obviously, I still don't entirely trust it to keep working, but
| okay to put in a crappy old laptop with nothing important on
| it.
| cjk wrote:
| I found myself agreeing with much of this article, but I have to
| say, I used SpinRite to great effect maybe 20 years ago on a
| drive that had the "click of death".
|
| I tried all kinds of methods of recovery, and nothing worked
| until I tried SpinRite. I can't speak to how it did what it did
| (who knows, maybe it was a total fluke), but it gave me the
| opportunity to scrape all of my data off of it before buying a
| replacement drive.
| rasz wrote:
| Clock of death means HDD bootloader is unable to find service
| area and load actual firmware/setup data from the platters. The
| only software able to fix that will have a database of drive
| models and firmwares for reinitialization (PC-3000). Spinrite
| does none of that, its just an MFM formatting utility that grew
| to be a snake oil over the years.
| MarkSweep wrote:
| While I understand some of the vibes the author picks up (can one
| guy who writes all his programs in assembler really have the
| answers to hard drive maintenance and recovery?), the article
| does not seem to go much beyond this vibe and speculation based
| reasoning. It would be more convincing if there were experiments
| testing the claimed benefits of using SpinRite, specifically
| around performance improvements caused by running a scan.
| Personally I think the claimed data recovery capabilities of
| SpinRite are less relevant these days due to file systems like
| ZFS that have scrubbing and data recovery built in. Distributed
| block and blob storage systems that clouds are built on have
| similar systems as well.
|
| I'd like to recommend Security Now, the podcast the the author of
| SpinRite, Steve Gibson, hosts. While at times Steve has a non-
| consensus take on things (other commenters have noted his
| preference for out-of-support versions of Windows), he is pretty
| good at explaining the technical details about the topics he
| covers. It's a good way to keep up with security news. Probably
| only the Security, Cryptography, Whatever podcast is better (more
| in-depth discussions of low level topics with experts), but it
| less consistently published.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| When someone makes extraordinary claims, it is their
| responsibility to prove those claims, not for others to
| disprove them. Further: there are numerous people who worked in
| the hard drive industry who say he's spouting bullshit with
| Spinrite.
|
| ZFS scrubbing is designed to counter issues that crop up with
| bit flips caused by extremely unlikely hardware errors and
| things like cosmic rays - which are extremely rare, but when
| you have petabyte scale storage, they actually become plausible
| risks.
|
| It has nothing to do with "refreshing" the data on-disk like
| Gibson claims, and it is only possible because it uses two
| layers of checksums to detect such bit-flips, comparing the
| file's checksum with the parity data used in the stripe (or the
| mirror.) That checksumming is integral to the filesystem.
| Spinrite doesn't have any similar function. It couldn't
| possibly "correct" data on a drive.
|
| The fact that you don't understand the difference between what
| amounts to a very dressed-up bad-block scan and ZFS scrubbing
| shows how under-qualified you are to be forming opinions on
| these subjects. Which is odd given you often listen to his
| podcast - how curious that you're not an expert /s
| MarkSweep wrote:
| > The fact that you don't understand the difference between
| what amounts to a very dressed-up bad-block scan and ZFS
| scrubbing shows how under-qualified you are to be forming
| opinions on these subjects.
|
| I thought I was pretty clear that I thought SpinRite was no
| longer relevant because of better file systems being
| available. Perhaps I should have elaborated in my comment
| that specifically the checksumming and redundancy provided by
| ZFS (and other filesystems) are what makes it scrubbing able
| to recover corrupted data. Data corruption that obviously
| SpinRite would be blind to.
| zbentley wrote:
| Could you edit your comment and remove the last paragraph?
| It's interesting info until you veer into personal insults,
| which doesn't help you inform others.
| toast0 wrote:
| > ZFS scrubbing is designed to counter issues that crop up
| with bit flips caused by extremely unlikely hardware errors
| and things like cosmic rays - which are extremely rare, but
| when you have petabyte scale storage, they actually become
| plausible risks.
|
| Scrubbing has multiple purposes. Sure cosmic rays, but it
| also helps detect poor cabling (if somehow that didn't throw
| checksum errors in regular use), wild writes and degrading
| media.
|
| Reading every sector with filesystem data is similar to a
| function of SpinRite that seems to read all sectors. Of
| course, SpinRite won't know if a good read holds bad data.
| But ZFS scrub doesn't read all sectors. According to claims,
| it sounds like SpinRite could issue uncorrected reads to a
| weak sector multiple times, run statistics and guess at the
| right value and write it back? That seems possibly useful,
| especially if the drive is likely to reallocate the sector
| when it's written to. Issuing writes to all sectors of a
| spinning disk can help the drive firmware with reallocating
| problematic sectors, although there's free tools to do that.
| asveikau wrote:
| > ZFS scrubbing is designed to counter issues that crop up
| with bit flips caused by extremely unlikely hardware errors
| and things like cosmic rays - which are extremely rare, but
| when you have petabyte scale storage, they actually become
| plausible risks.
|
| It's not rare at all and you don't need petabytes to hit it
| in your home. I also doubt it's caused by cosmic rays.
|
| People seem to have this view that hardware is rock solid all
| the time. It isn't. Components fail.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >Which is odd given you often listen to his podcast - how
| curious that you're not an expert /s
|
| Be nice.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The author of this piece seems to think highly of his abilities
| but by his own admission doesn't understand how spinrite works.
| Information that's not that hard to come by or imagine.
|
| On SN, Gibson explains for SSDs that SR rewrites marginal cells
| to avoid subsequent error correction delays, speeding things up.
|
| Notice the author doesn't say, I tried it on ten dead drives
| heading for the garbage heap and it did nothing... no, he says
| basically I don't _think_ it could work. Unless you actually
| wrote similar code you'd have no idea. Did this person even
| attempt to develop a low level disk tool of any capacity, much
| less one of production quality?
|
| Also complains about the website and SG being old-fashioned--well
| let's see your website when you're 70? and had decades of career
| behind you. I still prefer vintage to a react/electron
| monstrosity.
| rasz wrote:
| >Gibson explains for SSDs that SR rewrites marginal cells
|
| Gibson knows this is a lie, but he keeps repeating this. You
| cant target particular flash cell on SSD, its impossible. There
| is FTL between you and raw flash.
|
| What you can do is force SSD to reinitialize whole flash with
| ATA Secure Erase or NVMe Secure Erase. You dont need to spend
| $80 on snake oil software pretending to do something else to do
| Secure Erase.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I used that word because they aren't actually sectors, but
| it's immaterial if it is a cell or the enclosing sector. They
| can be overwritten as a full block of course.
|
| Whether this actually resets the voltages might vary by
| drive, who knows--would need to see hard data to properly
| verify. Without that data, both Gibson and critics are
| talking out their asses.
|
| Gibson is a known quantity and more reliable than internet
| nobodies however. It sounds feasible and I (so far) have no
| tangible reason to disbelieve him. If you want to prove him
| wrong, do the work.
| wrs wrote:
| It's 2024. You _can't_ develop a low-level disk tool, because
| there is no such thing as a low-level disk interface anymore.
| Using the rawest available interface, your tool will be several
| levels of abstraction away from the level Spinrite claims to
| operate at. It's like saying you're going to get AWS S3 to
| rewrite an object by accessing it through the HTTP API. I mean,
| sure, maybe, but any copy will do that just as well.
|
| It may "work", but the question is whether it works better than
| simple ddrescue.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| And DropBox is not needed either when rsync exists, right?
|
| Reality is that many fewer people know Linux than Windows
| tools. Lots of proprietary software is used when floss would
| do.
| raggi wrote:
| Disk encryption is what kills off these kinds of tools, they're
| useless on encrypted volumes. Some disk vendors themselves still
| ship specialized tools for smart block image recovery, if you've
| gone looking for recovery tools and don't want to fork out on
| forensics tools that's a good place to start when tools like
| ddrescue fail.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Anyone that had to deal with the aftermath of a failed HDD Raid
| set certainly was glad SpinRite was around.
|
| After the rise of shingled writes and SSD, the software was not
| as applicable to modern systems.
|
| Notably, most good SSD manufacturers provide automated hidden
| maintenance tools built into the firmware. Thus, some may be
| surprised to learn leaving an SSD with no power for more than a
| year is a really bad practice.
|
| Flushing the SSD cache after a system update is usually good
| practice once a week in off peak service hours. Most Linux
| distros will similarly defer the trim operations to a scheduled
| weekly cleaning cycle as well (lowers drive wear).
|
| If you still run old spinning HDD in equipment, than SpinRite can
| still save you a $2k recovery bill.
|
| Cheers =)
| LVB wrote:
| I get the huckster vibe he described as that was my impression
| long ago when I'd see it advertised all over, hear Steve speak,
| etc. I did in fact buy Spinrite once when my HDD was pretty well
| screwed. It didn't improve things, but credit where due: GRC did
| immediately honor the money back guarantee.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| It's easy to have a money back guarantee on your expensive
| miracle cure-all oil if it's just canola oil.
| sirtaj wrote:
| I remember running Spinrite regularly on my 286 as a kid in the
| early 90s like some sort of maintenance ritual, watching the
| magical blob pulsing like it was doing something deeply
| important. Meanwhile, each time it ran it would either 1) test a
| sector that had been marked bad and then unmark it as ok, or 2)
| test the same sector and mark it bad again.
|
| The idea that that same app is doing something useful 30+ years
| later strains credulity.
| downrightmike wrote:
| The way drives work, hasn't really changed at the low level,
| they've just been crammed with space.
| sirtaj wrote:
| The interfaces by which the system communicates with the
| drive have been heavily abstracted though, which means
| spinrite is now similar to a block copy with failure retries.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| Before talking about whether SpinRite was ever any good or not,
| it's good to consider the hard drives that were in use at the
| time it became popular. These early drives pretty much all came
| with a ST506 interface, as well as in MFM and RLL variants (there
| were also ESDI and SCSI drives, but since these were exclusively
| used on high-end systems, they're safe to ignore due to their
| rarity. The distinction between MFM and RLL can also be ignored,
| as RLL drives were really only differently-specced MFM drives
| that allowed the controller to do some rudimentary compression on
| the bitstream in order to expand usable capacity).
|
| The thing about the ST506 interface is that it was really,
| _really_ simple: you (the disk controller) could seek to a track,
| the drive would tell you when that was done, then you could
| select a head, and the drive would tell you when the start of the
| track passed under that, and then you could read or write bits to
| the thus-selected cylinder. Again ignoring some finer points like
| precompensation and read recovery, you really only cared about
| three drive parameters: the number of tracks, the number of heads
| (multiplying these gave you the number of cylinders), plus how
| many bits you could approximately write to each cylinder. If you
| take a look at the OEM manual for the ST225 (a very popular ST506
| drive at the time), the simplicity just jumps at you:
| https://archive.org/details/seagate-st-225-oem-manual-oct-85
|
| You'll also notice, though, that there is no real mention of
| 'sectors' anywhere just yet. That's because that wasn't a drive
| concept, but something managed by the controller, which was
| responsible for dividing cylinders into sectors holding 512 bytes
| of user data. That division would mostly be timing-based, but to
| allow for error detection and recovery, the controller would add
| some metadata to each sector: typically, a sector number and
| simple checksum, which was sufficient to perform timing recovery
| and retry reads as required.
|
| After connecting a new drive to a given controller, the user
| would therefore need to run a 'low level format', typically by
| invoking some code in the controller card ROM BIOS, or by running
| a vendor-supplied utility: this would then go through all
| cylinders and write the metadata, including all-zero user data,
| for each sector. For some sectors, this would yield a write
| fault, and such sectors would be added to a bad sector list,
| resulting in a drive with a capacity slightly below that
| advertised. Another parameter used for this low-level format was
| the 'sector interleave': instead of dividing a cylinder into
| sectors 1-2-3-4-5 and so on, the controller would do something
| like 1-100-200-300-400-2-101-201-301-401-3, with the exact
| numbers depending on the capacity of the drive, obviously, but
| mostly the speed of the host system. Because PCs were _really_
| slow at the time, demanding tasks like 'reading 2 sectors
| sequentially' would result in a miss on the second sector,
| meaning having to wait for an entire disk rotation before trying
| again. By interleaving sectors, this miss could be avoided,
| greatly improving performance, but also _hindering_ performance
| in case the selected interleave never or no longer (i.e. after an
| upgrade) matched the host speed.
|
| Now, let's turn to SpinRite. Its author, Steve Gibson, understood
| the relationship between disk, controller and BIOS _really_ well,
| and cleverly improved on the default experience, which only
| provided destructive low-level formatting and virtually no
| diagnostics tools. By combining this understanding with a
| database of drive parameters and controller BIOS details (mainly:
| what is the address and calling convention of the per-sector
| read, write and format routines) and a fancy GUI, he provided
| some real value to early hard drive users.
|
| Initially setting up a drive with SpinRite required no obscure
| DEBUG commands or utilities, nor guessing of the optimal sector
| interleave: SpinRite would perform some tests to figure the
| latter out, and then perform the low-level format, with a
| progress bar and all, which was unheard of in vendor tooling.
| Even better, Gibson figured out how to do a _non-destructive_
| low-level format, and that was the true SpinRite superpower.
| Upgraded to a faster system and now stuck with a nonoptimal
| sector interleave? SpinRite could fix that for you! Did your
| drive degrade a bit (due to platters /heads getting out of
| alignment and/or the stepper motor wobbling), SpinRite could
| literally restore it to factory-fresh performance!
|
| So, fancy GUI and incredibly impressive marketing aside (which
| Gibson was _really_ good at as well), the basic algorithm that
| gave SpinRite its legendary reputation was quite simple: invoke
| the controller BIOS to read all sectors for a few tracks into a
| ring buffer in RAM (employing as many retries as needed to
| recover the data if at all possible), re-order those sectors if
| changing the sector interleave, invoke the controller BIOS low-
| level format for the first half of these sectors (because you don
| 't want to low-level format too close to data you haven't touched
| yet!), then write back the data. Rinse, repeat, with some clever
| handling of bad sectors and saving checkpoint data to an unused
| disk sector, so restarting the system during a SpinRite run
| rarily resulted in data loss.
|
| This worked really well for a long time, but broke down
| _completely_ when disks stopped using ST506 and migrated to
| "Integrated Drive Electronics" (IDE) interfacing. When using IDE,
| the responsibility for managing "sectors" moves from the
| controller to the disk itself. This greatly simplified the
| controller-to-disk interface, as the former no longer needed to
| know about track or head counts: instead, the disk simply
| presented sequential sector numbers, LBAs. LBA-to-physical-sector
| mapping became a disk vendor responsibility, which it remains to
| this day in newer interfaces like SATA, SAS and NMVe.
|
| IDE did away with a number of things, including sector
| interleave, which due to the increase in host speeds was no
| longer relevant. But it also made it impossible to perform a 'low
| level format' type operation, since that was now fully a drive
| responsibility. Of course, the drive firmware _might_ provide
| equivalent functionalty to the controller, but, especially in the
| early days of IDE, it _definitely_ didn 't do so.
|
| This meant that SpinRite's magic no longer worked on IDE drives.
| Sure: it could still attempt to read all your data (and with
| enough retries, that did allow for data recovery in some
| situations), then write it back (which might trigger a sector re-
| allocation in the IDE drive, but who knows), but that was about
| it. This did _not_ stop Gibson from continuing to market it, and
| 'The Internet' from continuing to embrace it. There were rumors
| of SpinRite having special backdoor access to IDE controllers and
| such, but that was basically all nonsense. SpinRite was now
| `ddrescue` with some `chkdsk` and `smartmontools` thrown in, just
| with a _much_ nicer user interface.
|
| So, SpinRite started out as an extremely useful tool that was
| worth its money, then degraded to a no-longer-magical shell of
| its former self that continued to be over-hyped, often
| passionately, for about a decade after the point it should have
| faded into obscurity. There is a lot of hazy discussion around
| these facts, but simply by looking at how the underlying tech
| evolved, the picture becomes pretty clear...
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Isn't part of the reason modern hard disks seem more reliable,
| that they have much more sophisticated file systems on them? In
| the old days, merely turning a machine off at the wrong moment
| might introduce inconsistencies that could cause data corruption
| later. Or on Lin*x, when's the last time you've had to look for
| the wreckage of files in the lost+found directory? Does anyone
| even remember what it's for?
|
| I've had even modern HDs go gradually bad and the remaining
| undamaged files are generally readable without trouble.
| Majromax wrote:
| > Or on Lin*x, when's the last time you've had to look for the
| wreckage of files in the lost+found directory? Does anyone even
| remember what it's for?
|
| Files that still existed by reference to an orphaned inode, one
| that was not linked to from a directory entry.
|
| The need for it greatly diminished with the widespread
| implementation of journaling filesystems.
| nelsonic wrote:
| To all the sceptics: been using SpinRite since 2007 on many HHDs
| and it has saved us _many_ times. Steve Gibson knows hard drives
| and their recovery better than anyone. Highly recommend it if you
| need to recover a drive.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Yet there are testimonials here in this thread that it can make
| a damaged drive worse. For some use cases the professionals are
| worth their high fees. SpinRite is for low stakes situations or
| folks who cannot afford better.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479468
| nelsonic wrote:
| Disagree. SpinRite is for a hard drive that still runs but
| the computer does not recognise. i.e. it's a great diagnostic
| tool! If the drive doesn't power-up or "clicks" (because the
| reader broken) then yes, of course take it to "pros" first to
| see what they can do. But the "pros" _use_ SpinRite and
| charge you $50 /hour. And if you live somewhere remote where
| there are no competent technicians ... -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| I've used SpinRite to recover "photo backup" drives for
| relatives where their local PC repair shop said "nothing can
| be done". For that relative it's their _life_ on the HHD,
| couldn 't be more high stakes than that (to them) and I trust
| it without any hesitation. SpinRite just goes to work and a
| few hours (sometimes days) later it magically works again.
|
| Easily worth the $89 Steve charges for it.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I didn't mean unqualified repair shops. Rather professional
| recovery services who specialize in getting data off of
| damaged and failing drives.
| epcoa wrote:
| > "pros" use SpinRite and charge you $50/hour.
|
| Data recovery experts definitely do not use SpinRite (I
| cannot speak for every corner computer shop and random 13
| year olds on the next claiming to be data recovery experts)
|
| > Easily worth the $89 Steve charges for it.
|
| ddrescue and photorec are free.
| ikiris wrote:
| My anti tiger rock also has kept my life tiger free.
| 8372049 wrote:
| Have you tried ddrescue?
| epcoa wrote:
| > Steve Gibson knows hard drives and their recovery better than
| anyone
|
| No he doesn't. He's a charlatan.
|
| http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=181&t=2929
|
| He uses the same marketing speak since 40 years ago when MFM
| drives were the norm even though hard drive technology has
| changed fundamentally at all layers.
|
| If you have questionable media the safest thing to do is make
| an image, not try to "repair" the device in place.
|
| I'm not a sceptic, I just know what I'm talking about. Anyone
| with a slightly detailed knowledge of modern hard drives knows
| that the SpinRite claims are hogwash.
|
| It would be harmless if it didn't actually waste precious time
| on marginal media not simply trying to make an expedient image.
| grymoire1 wrote:
| While Gibson is overly pompous, I should point out that SpinRite
| works below the file system structure, and not all filesystems
| are robust like ZFS, etc. Second - there are two main SpinRite
| modes - Read/Check and Read/Write/Correct. SSD's should obviously
| never use the second mode. I suppose the first mode might be used
| to check if there are problems on a SSD.
|
| SpinRite - last time I used it, was painfully slow - like days or
| even weeks to run. He's been working on a faster SpinRite 6.1 for
| at least 10 years now. FWIW, here's the current (2021) roadmap -
| https://www.grc.com/miscfiles/GRC-Development-Roadmap.pdf
| stavros wrote:
| SpinRite 6.1 is out:
|
| https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
| epcoa wrote:
| What does Spinrite actually do that is materially different
| than ddrescue?
|
| And the idea of repairing a failing disk and not just making an
| image is usually insane.
|
| > I should point out that SpinRite works below the file system
| structure
|
| This is not the flex that you seem to think it is.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > What does Spinrite actually do that is materially different
| than ddrescue?
|
| Pretty sure Spinrite repairs/recovers, as you imply in your
| very next sentence (which I agree with, it's not a good idea
| to play with the filesystem of a failing disk.) I've never
| used it, though, so I may be wrong.
|
| The real question for me is why would somebody pay for it
| over using ddrescue to get an image, and _TestDisk /PhotoRec_
| to do the filesystem recovery (on the image)? They're free
| and very good.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddrescue
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk
| jszymborski wrote:
| I will always be nostalgic about Steve Gibson and Leo Laport on
| Screen Savers airing on G4.
|
| I loved the GRC website as a kid, but was not surprised many
| years ago when I learned that Gibson sometimes spoke from a place
| of authority where he was a bit out of his depth. The way he has
| spoken about Vitamin D cones to mind.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| That was in 2015, he might have been ahead of the curve on that
| one.
| jszymborski wrote:
| The metadata from this page [0] is from 2009 and makes some,
| uh, interesting assertions about how Big Pharma is why folks
| don't "know" about Vitamin D.
|
| [0] https://www.grc.com/health/vitamin-d.htm
| stavros wrote:
| Well, the assertion is just "pharma companies don't
| research it because there's no money in it, because it
| can't be patented", which makes sense.
| jszymborski wrote:
| According to this page, there is plenty of research to
| show that Vitamin D is a cure-all that folks just don't
| know about:
|
| > We see expensive commercials every night during prime
| time for expensive and patented pharmaceuticals ... but
| we never see any similar advertisements mentioning that
| study after study has shown that simply (and
| inexpensively) maintaining sufficient levels of Vitamin D
| can work to prevent rickets (that's well known) but also
| 17 types of cancer ... lower blood pressure, improve
| immune system function (prevents colds and flu),
| autoimmune function, inflammation, multiple sclerosis,
| autism, allergies, preeclampsia, both type 1 and type 2
| diabetes, osteoporosis (also well known) depression,
| muscle and bone weakness and generalized pain.
|
| The natural supplement industry is a multi-billion dollar
| industry, and has been for a long while. If Vitamin D was
| the panacea that Mr. Gibson is representing it to be
| here, I'm sure that GMC would be running ads about
| treating "autism and cancer" with Vitamin D non-stop.
|
| Further, if Vitamin D did all of the above, I can assure
| you that pharmas would be researching the mechanism of
| action to create effective derivatives.
|
| If a treatment is effective and it isn't a super rare
| disease, you'll find a pharma somewhere selling it
| somehow.
| asveikau wrote:
| It's kind of hilarious that he's also distributing that in
| bin/cue with the expectation that some people will burn it
| to an audio CD.
|
| Flac would serve the need for raw PCM quality just fine,
| though I don't think we generally need that for podcasts.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I believe he really got into the keto diet at one point.
| beefnugs wrote:
| There is something strange to what the article says about modern
| drives dying hard and fast now. They used to just slow down a
| whole bunch and you knew you had time to grab info off them. (i
| assume the seal just broke eventually and they lost the special
| inert gas in there?)
|
| But now they just die sudden, which i feel is worse. I think i
| have seen USB drives that die in a fashion where they become
| read-only which seems like a half decent idea
| r1ch wrote:
| Modern SSD drives typically die to controller failure, e.g.
| unclean power offs corrupting internal state that crashes the
| firmware, internal counters overflowing after time, memory
| errors on the internal DRAM, etc. All from to the complexity of
| needing the FTL to pretend it's a regular disk to the OS.
| ck2 wrote:
| Back when hard drives were MFM and up to 20 MEGAbytes and then
| RLL controllers came to make 20MB into 30MB and drives would
| constantly fail because they didn't even auto-park the heads on
| powerdown, SpinRite saved my butt many times.
|
| I bought it up to version 5 if I vaguely remember correctly and I
| think I still have a sealed spare copy around somewhere (used to
| resell to customers).
|
| If SpinRite was "fake" it sure did something for me.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| The article states, "By association, I suspect that GRC's
| flagship product, SpinRite, doesn't get a lot of active
| maintenance either."
|
| However, Gibson released 6.1 a month or so ago
| https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
| torgoguys wrote:
| Yes, he did. However, that was the first release in close to 20
| years.
| starttoaster wrote:
| If you listen to the Security Now podcast, Steve Gibson often
| says it hasn't seen an update because it hasn't needed an
| update. I'd imagine there's at least some truth to that.
| Drives change all the time, but does hard drive interface
| technology change all that much?
| HankB99 wrote:
| Years ago I bought Spinrite. Past the 30 day return policy
| I was disappointed to learn that it was limited to 2TB
| HDDs. At that time most of my HDDs were larger. I asked
| about an upgrade and was told "Real Soon Now." Years ago. I
| asked for a refund and was told (paraphrasing) "you took
| too long to determine that Spinrite doesn't meet your
| needs."
|
| Back in the day before integrated drive electronics,
| Spinrite was very useful for adjusting the sector
| interleave to improve disk performance. With drive
| electronics and management firmware improvements, Spinrite
| was useless.
|
| > Steve Gibson often says it hasn't seen an update because
| it hasn't needed an update.
|
| That's the worst kind of gaslighting.
| torgoguys wrote:
| Yes, he SAYS that but it's not true which is part of what
| irks people. It has needed an update for a long time. He or
| Leo on the podcast have long said or implied 6.0 is more or
| less "bug free." But for example, read spinrite forums
| about unrecoverable division overflow errors, divide by
| zero errors that pop up with a red background. "Try
| updating your bios" or "try it in another computer" is the
| typical advice given, not a fix. And I think there is a
| drive size limit that has long been an issue.
| downrightmike wrote:
| ~~~~~There weren't any bugs~~~~~~~
| wnevets wrote:
| It has saved a many of hard drives for me over the years. The new
| release is also making my SSDs faster
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I remember more than 20 years ago, there used to be a website
| grc.com as well as grcsucks.com, a site that was very much
| criticising the former.
|
| Grc contained, next to a link to hdd recovery software, a section
| titled 'shields up' that you could use to do a port scan on your
| own IP address with some advice by Gibson and some 'rants' about
| Microsoft supporting raw sockets, even though he warned them that
| it was a very bad idea.
|
| The whole Gibson franchise felt snake oilish back then, for a big
| part because it sounded snobbish, very 'listen to me the smart
| guy!'. But still I have no idea whether or not it was legit
| info...?
| sillywalk wrote:
| I remember GRC for DCOMbobulator, that disabled DCOM.
| mindslight wrote:
| My recollection of his networking utilities is similar. The raw
| sockets thing was obvious nonsense and demonstrated a
| fundamental inability to understand security
| (software/capabilities of remote parties are completely
| independent from your local environment - removing a feature
| from Windows that can facilitate attacks would not affect
| Windows's defensive vulnerabilities!). You'd meet plenty of
| types of these people in the 90's/00's, possessing security
| "certifications" but no actual mental model of how anything
| worked. I once had to suffer a university head of IT who was
| scared of individuals running Linux connected to the campus
| network because "there was no company to sue".
|
| Gibson's whole schtick felt like a snake oil salesman that got
| a cult following of a bunch of Windows noobs that found his
| simple utilities useful (perhaps SpinRite was one of these) and
| then extrapolated from that into believing the vacuous
| technobabble marketing. In the circles I ran in, "Gibson" and
| "Shields Up!" were more punchlines for jokes than anything
| else. The concurrent "Hack the Gibson" meme didn't help that
| either.
|
| I've thoroughly enjoyed posts on this blog. Based on the title
| I was actually worried that this post was going to be talking
| about GRC uncritically, and was greatly relieved when it did
| not.
| asveikau wrote:
| I've found ddrescue does a good job recovering data from bad
| media by doing strategic retries.
|
| But mostly ... I don't have need of a utility like this since I
| started using zfs.
|
| I don't think less demand for this type of tool means hard drives
| are better now. I think in today's world of periodically trashing
| broken devices rather than attempting repair, most normies just
| ignore this problem space. They might put something really
| important on an online service, other than that they accept data
| loss when shit breaks, and get a whole new laptop or whatever.
| guilhas wrote:
| I would definitely recomend Steve and Leo's podcast 'Security
| Now' quite good at explaining CVEs and other security news
|
| I don't know about SpinRite but I would imagin it is just like
| any tool, useful for someone
| pxx wrote:
| This whole "discussion" indicates only one real thing: people who
| have been scammed by a sales tactic will most likely _double
| down_ on their past poor decisions instead of reevaluating the
| facts, as they are now emotionally invested in their past
| decisions.
| iwontberude wrote:
| In 2006 I worked for a company that regularly used SpinRite for
| recovery and it did indeed work miracles. I wouldn't assume it
| has any utility today however.
| downrightmike wrote:
| It does. Because we still have drives.
| prosaic-hacker wrote:
| TLDR: 30% success rate for a $89 expense over 200 drives in 15
| years is more than enough anecdotal evidence to say it was worth
| it.
|
| I bought it 15 years ago and have run it on about 200 drives. My
| anecdotal results are in thirds with about equal results for
| drives(both spinning and ssd) that have measurable slowdown from
| new. 1. No visible improvement of the situation. 2. Moderate
| improvement in speed or identification of "bad sections of the
| drive". 3. Significant improvement in speed or readability.
|
| For the third group especially backup times were horrible or
| failed so the idea of doing the backup not the rescue first were
| not successful so we had no option but try the recuse.
|
| In this case after the rescue the backup worked. I then backup up
| the backup because one copy is not enough (min 3 on different
| media and at least one offsite). Then restore/image the disk and
| boot up the system with a new disk and put the old one on a shelf
| until you have appropriate back ups of the new one. Then destroy
| the old one so no one can use it.
|
| 30% success rate for a $89 expense over 200 drives in 15 years is
| more than enough anecdotal evidence to say it was worth it.
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