SpinRite still relevant?

[Diggs]

I've always appreciated the work of Steve Gibson and long ago I had a copy of SpinRite. (I still use his port checker.) Seems SpinRite has been updated to benefit SSDs. I included a section of an email I got a few days ago. Not sure I'm convinced as to the benefits -

***
SpinRite has been significantly improved

After 20 years, SpinRite 6.0 has been updated to 6.1, and as a licensed owner of 6.0, you are invited to upgrade your copy of SpinRite at no cost.

SpinRite restores SSD performance

The biggest surprise was discovering that even solid state mass storage could benefit from SpinRite's rewriting of its media. Due to “read disturb”, SSD and Flash storage slow down when they are only read and never written — which affects most operating system files. People say that their SSD-based laptops no longer perform as well as they once did — now we know why.

During the 3.5 years of work on v6.1, we discovered that SpinRite could restore SSD original factory performance.

There's MUCH more to say and share. You can find everything at grc.com.
***

 

[Rosco]

I always thought SpinRite was snake oil and dangerous.

 

[Metanis]

Dave posted recently on SpinRite and got a lot of negative feedback regarding using it on SSDs

 

[timeshifter]

After 20 years, SpinRite 6.0 has been updated to 6.1

What a crazy release schedule, how can anyone keep up???

 

[phaZed]

I always thought SpinRite was snake oil and dangerous.

I always felt the same about it.

 

[Diggs]

I always thought SpinRite was snake oil and dangerous.

Especially in the early days of SpinRite there were no tools to do what it could do on examining and trying to restore a failing HDD. To me, it was the ddrescue of the DOS world. Steve Gibson has always been reputable and wouldn't still be around if there wasn't validity to his products. But, I do question SpinRite on SSDs (but what do I know?).

@add - SSDs may slow down with age but I haven't noticed it and don't really bench mark those things anymore unless trying to diagnose a problem. I'm a relic of HDDs and even the slowest SSD is an order or two faster than the fastest HDD so I'm still in awe.

 

[Metanis]

I've never purchased or ran SpinRite. And I certainly wouldn't arbitrarily try and write to every cell on an SSD.

However, on my own BACKUP mechanical data drives I will run a chkdsk with the /r switch which will force a read (and repair) of every sector. On these drives I want the drive electronics to detect marginal sectors before they become unreadable. I don't do this on drives in active use, only on the drives I use to store backups and images from customer drives.

 

[sapphirescales]

I've been testing it for data recovery on SSDs with mixed results. Before using SpinRite, I first make an image backup of the failing SSD. If the image isn't bootable or there are bad sectors that contain data, I run SpinRite. Then I make another image and compare how long it takes to make another image and if any more data can be recovered. For drives that aren't too bad I've had good results but I wouldn't expect it to work miracles on a badly failing drive. I would not recommend starting a data recovery with SpinRite under any circumstances.

On a personal note, my main shop computer has thousands upon thousands of clients and invoices. I've never had a problem opening my client list but recently the computer has been freezing up and taking a really long time to open my huge list of clients. This shouldn't be happening because I use an enterprise grade U.2 SSD on this computer. I ran SpinRite on the SSD and it seems to have fixed the problem. Whether a CHKDSK /r would have fixed the problem too is anyone's guess. Since enterprise grade U.2 SSDs have a much higher write endurance (mine is 28PBW) I wasn't concerned about running SpinRite on the drive, even a level 3. Supposedly a level 2 is safe to use on SSDs but I wouldn't run SpinRite as part of regular maintenance on an SSD. In fact, I wouldn't run it at all on an SSD unless I was having an issue and already had an image backup of the drive.

Is it snake oil? I have no idea. I'll continue testing it to see if it has any use in my shop but it's definitely not something I would run just for fun or for regular maintenance.

 

[NviGate Systems]

I find HDD Regenerator works better than Spinrite. On drives that had issues reading data or unknown filesystem it often worked wonders. It might just be leverage built in drive utilities but that's not a bad thing.

I could never understand the logic behind it because I'm not one of the chosen few or it predates me.(Spinrite)

But as always make sure you have a backup of stuff.

But also, the SSD thing is like, did they crack the code behind controllers? SSD operate on a whole different level. That's like that Audio PCI E card Linus Tech Tips reviewed a while back....it was a PCIE card with nothing but caps that promised to boost audio fidelity.

 

[Diggs]

HDD Regenerator

Haaa! I've used this for years but not as much anymore. Thought it was obscure and unknown. I use it on backup storage HDDs before repurposing them.

 

[Markverhyden]

From my view point nothing happens in a vacuum. Back when HD's were several hundred dollars and cheap computer was 2k I'd look at using spinright, etc on the off chance i might be able to save someone quite a few $. That changed some 15 years ago or so. Their very low price made replacement sensible if there was any doubt about their condition. It's even more so today.

 

[GTP]

I've been testing it for data recovery on SSDs with mixed results. Before using SpinRite, I first make an image backup of the failing SSD. If the image isn't bootable or there are bad sectors that contain data, I run SpinRite. Then I make another image and compare how long it takes to make another image and if any more data can be recovered. For drives that aren't too bad I've had good results but I wouldn't expect it to work miracles on a badly failing drive. I would not recommend starting a data recovery with SpinRite under any circumstances.

On a personal note, my main shop computer has thousands upon thousands of clients and invoices. I've never had a problem opening my client list but recently the computer has been freezing up and taking a really long time to open my huge list of clients. This shouldn't be happening because I use an enterprise grade U.2 SSD on this computer. I ran SpinRite on the SSD and it seems to have fixed the problem. Whether a CHKDSK /r would have fixed the problem too is anyone's guess. Since enterprise grade U.2 SSDs have a much higher write endurance (mine is 28PBW) I wasn't concerned about running SpinRite on the drive, even a level 3. Supposedly a level 2 is safe to use on SSDs but I wouldn't run SpinRite as part of regular maintenance on an SSD. In fact, I wouldn't run it at all on an SSD unless I was having an issue and already had an image backup of the drive.

Is it snake oil? I have no idea. I'll continue testing it to see if it has any use in my shop but it's definitely not something I would run just for fun or for regular maintenance.

On Jun 6 2024, @sapphirescales said..

When someone lies and sells snake oil, it's natural not to trust them. Yeah maybe they're just scamming people with one thing but why would you trust someone who claims his software can do something that's impossible? The only thing worse I've seen is that iOS app that claimed to be able to charge your phone via solar. News flash: You can't add a solar panel to a phone using software, and you can't "fix" a hardware issue with a hard drive using software either.

Wow you bounce around like a rubber ball...

 

[sapphirescales]

Wow you bounce around like a rubber ball...

What I said before in my previous post and what I've said now in this post do not conflict. I'm using it for data recovery on drives that I've already imaged. I'm not trying to "fix" a hardware problem with software, and I'm still not convinced that it's not snake oil. It can't hurt to try something and experiment. That's how we learn and increase our skills as technicians. The $90 I spent is trivial compared to what I stand to gain if this software helps with data recovery. There's no way I was going to use 20 year old software on modern computers but since there was an updated version I decided to try it. It sucks that it's still in DOS. WTF has this guy been doing for 20 years? He's like a fossil that just woke up.

 

[lcoughey]

Was and always will be snake oil...especially as long as they market it as a data recovery program.

 

[Joep]

In essence what SR does is too simple. It reads a sector, detects if the protocol returns an error, evaluates the data it read to see if it really read something, and then depending on what level scan it writes the data back or not. Maybe it writes twice, first inverted then actual data (nonsense exercise, but ok) but in essence it does basic things. And as a result of this it may detect issues, cause sector reallocations and whatnot.

IF SG was open about this and didn't hype it up then everything would be good. But SG is not like that, instead of a read/write surface scanner he sells you the absolute best in disk maintenance and data recovery technology!! And this is what makes him a snake oil salesman in my book. All his buzzword techniques are in essence so mind-blowingly simple that if people understood this, they go .. "is that all?!" ..

"Yeah. but it works on SSD too!!" .. Again everything it does (apart from wasting write/erase cycles) and accomplishes is the result of simple read-writes and what the drive does all by itself. Any read/write surface scanner (HDAT2, Victoria, MHDD) would have same effect. And I can't stress this enough, it goes against every .. freaking .. protocol in data recovery where we try avoid writing to the same freaking drive!

Okay, the big deal about this latest release is that it (finally) understands a protocol to speak to IDE/ATA/SATA drives directly. He claimed this for years, in reality SR accessed hard drives through BIOS software interrupts (which it still does for all other protocols (UBS, NVMe, etc.). Compare this to an open source tool like OpenSuperClone which natively speaks more protocols than SpinRite and follows the safe approach of rescuing data by writing it to another drive.

Anyway, this is what took him like three years, three years to go from one issue to the next that were a result of supporting a new protocol for reading/writing SATA drives. Now while it is the case that he now has more direct access to SATA harddrives, it does not come close some magical level of understanding of hard drives, or SSDs. In fact he (Steve) initially told SR was not for SSDs! It was only after some people ran it on SSDs and reported their results that he (Steve) started rationalizing that and decided it was a 'feature' and that heck, you can run it on SSDs, SD cards and USB flash drives too!

Again, all it does is read a sector, write it back .. All effects of that simple sequence are not magic, it's simply how drives work: read something, write something, and if drives detect a problem with that, it's the drive's firmware that will deal with the problem.