*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.
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. ;)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 😂
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! 😊😊
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.
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.
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'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. 👍
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.
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!
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. 😊
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.
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!!!
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.
Steve Gibson's software can work wonders and I have him to thank for a deeper understanding of soft- and hardware. Thanks for bringing Spinrite to the attention of more people, it can truly help with many disk issues
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.
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.
I remember working for a company specialized in recover data from hard drives. Spinrite and zero assumption recovery were our right hand. Utilities that i still use
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! 🇬🇧👍
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.
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.
Thank you for covering one of my favorite tools from the 1980's and 1990's. 😎 And I appreciate the notification that Mr. Gibson has a new version out! At some point I plan to upgrade to the latest version again. 🥳
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 have plenty of backup hard drives and old laptop drives that SR could benefit from. I remember SpinRite from way back when and thought it was a great idea. I just forgot that I still need it ! Thanks for this one !
Hi Dave, Thank you for the interesting and informative content on your channel. I operate a Windows 7 computer for my business that I constructed around 2011/12. It is rebooted every working day and my original boot drive finally failed earlier this year. I attribute it's long life to my semi regular use of Spinrite on all of my HDDs and SSDs. By the way, I had a clone boot drive already installed in the chassis and was up and running again in 5 minutes. I also have a duplicate computer at home which is kept up to date via Dropbox. regards, Marcus Wilson, Wellington New Zeland.
Amazing review, Dave, awesome detail on how SpinRite worked on electrical level, such a tribute to Steve's engineering skills! I've found out SpinRite when using earlier XT/AT clones with MFM drives (I still have one 20MB with its controller card but no old PC to run it). Optimizing disk interleave from 1:1 to an optimal relation was like magic (if I am not wrong interleave was not optimized on pre-IDE drives). Miss all the fun playing with it.
Excellent presentation. Thank you. Checked and found where my licensed copy of SpinRite 6.0 was bought in July of 2005. Incredibly, Steve allows download of the new version for free with your old license. Thanks Steve! Back in the day - 80's and 90's - drive issues like you describe were common and often. I remember doing a low level formatting and needing to input bad sectors, by hand, from the label in the drive. Today's stuff - both HDD and SDD - are just amazingly good in comparison.
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.
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.
Data degradation? Heck, Spinrite was originally about non-destructively low-level reformatting your hard drive in order to optimize its sector interleave! :D
Nice trip down memory lane for me. My first job as a programmer was at a NYC bank and the programs were on the DEC PDP 11/70. Some ran RSTS/E and we programmed in BASIC and some ran RSX/11 and was programmed in FORTRAN. When I left them to go to another bank, we used VAX 11/780. And eventually the Alphas. I recall my manager joking with the DEC field service guy about how easy it was to swap out an RA60 disk. The next time we had to do so, the tech let him do it. Easy-peazy. Granted, he had been watching him do it all those previous times so disconnecting cables and such made it easy for my manager. I thought I had sub'd when I watched an earlier video. It seems I did not. I've fixed that bug. Oh, by the way, since I always ask YT hosts to not have any background music on the dialogue track, I feel it is only fair that I thank you for not doing so.
1GB in the 486 era was a really big drive. In that era I started with a 105MB IDE drive but my last 486 ended up with a pair of 383MB ESDI drives. That was also an unusual amount of storage for a home computer. Now my home computer has 5TB of SSD and is running with about 2/3 of that storage used. I did own Spinrite but I never concluded that it was of significant benefit to me. It's one of those things that if it worked you'll never know how much improvement you got.
Right. I worked at a computer store in 1992 and 1993 when the 486 was introduced. We typically sold Seagate ST351A IDE 40 MB drives as the standard for high end 386/486 machines for home use (and the ST351A/X for those still using XT machines, which was still a thing). We would joke how Windows 3.1 took 10MB of the drive's space to install, calling it "The 10MB Solitaire Game". For those with a bit more cash, and businesses, we would install the Seagate ST3144A IDE 120MB hard drive. It was HUGE for the time. I probably built well over 100 computer systems during that time period using those two drives and upgraded hundreds more.
I remember RL02 discs used in PDP 11/34s at my first workplace - the computer room was impressive with lots of large boxes with flashing lights. We worked at terminals in the front area and the computers were at the rear of the office block. One day I had a call at 8am to say the office had burned down. Yes the whole lot had caught fire and we had a slow restart after that. The directors who owned the company must have had insurance and so out of the ashes, the company rose up again like the proverbial Phoenix and is still alive today and using desktop computers now!
Wow, memory lane. Steve Gibson, SpinRite, software in machine language, his security podcast (was it called a podcast back then?). I was a HUGE fan. Lost track of it all but lately have been thinking about that software, but couldn't remember his name. Thanks, great timing on your part.
Big fan of SpiRite and 6.1 license holder ! thanks for doing this video 6:38 you could have also mentioned the fact that it can approach sectors from different directions with the read head and at different velocities :) clever stuff by Steve
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 have to thank Dave for this excellent explanation of the new Spinrite 6.1 and why it is such a useful tool. As always, excellently done, clear and understandable. I am currently in the process of convincing my wife that I need the new version, and thus a new $89.00 USD payment for the license. She isn't convinced yet, but this video may help in addition to the excellent walk-through recently done by Steve himself. Being broke, and the wonderful difference between CAD and USD makes my wife shudder. I just see it as a necessary expense. I am sure I am not alone in this particular predicament when it comes to new tools. At least my wife knows about some of this and is willing to listen to my pitch. LOL
This following is just some personal advice, and of course you are free to use it or ignore it: When married, each partner should be allocated a small amount of money each paycheck to do with what they want. For example, maybe at each paycheck, each partner will get $20. This "mad money" can be immediately spent, saved, or a combination of both. The decision about what to do with this money will be up to each person, with no consultation with the other partner. Marriage should not be slavery. A husband or a wife should have the freedom to make small purchases on their own.
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
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.
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.
Never heard of this program but it sure sounds like a good thing to run on my archival drives where I store things like photos and old tv series from my childhood that u can not find anymore anywhere. These drives are not used at all very often but mostly just sitting in a cabinet where I count on them safely holding all the stuff untill i decide i want to watch it again someday. A data refresh might indeed be a good thing to do on them.
Like you, I too have been a long-time user and fan of Spirited. I had not considered its use with SSD drives. Spirited got me out of many a pickle but given the MFM or RLL drives we then had, it could be a 24 hour or more process if the drive was large or if there were a lot of errors. I'll see what's new in 6.1 (I think my last version was 6.0) following your video. Many thanks for the nudge.
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.
Interesting that this video came out today, Steve Gibson had released a video a few days ago and popped up in my suggested videos. He also shows the importance of the Initial memory test before using SpinRite on a drive..
One of the most significant changes in SpinRite v6.1 is its use of "flat real mode" which allows for 16 megabyte transfer buffers under real mode DOS. If you upgrade 6.0 to 6.1 (no charge even after 20 years) you'll find that a 2TB drive can be processed in around 3 hours total. No more "days and days"! 👍
As a retired Network Engineer and Administrator I agree 95% of the techs today would not be able to function in the world we had back in the beginning. I remember using v3 years ago, and I recovered many a failing drive with it. Later we used v6 but by that time drive failures were so rare we hardly used it except for some testing. It is a great product and I wondered if they would ever update it again.
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 - 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.
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.
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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'.
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. ;)
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?
The sound of that Commodore hard drive spinning up was awesome.
Louder than my washing machine except at the final spin cycle.
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.
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
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?
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
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
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!
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?
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.
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.
Dave - Interview!!! Did I mention you should interview Steve! That would be awesome!!!
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.
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 😂
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.
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! 😊😊
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 👍
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.
My gosh! I haven't heard the name, SpinRite, in two decades! Purchased, downloaded, and added to the toolbox. Thanks, Dave!
Thanks Dave. SpinRite worked wonders back in the day for bad drives.
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'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!
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.
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!
I'm a great fan of DNSbench and always wondered what Spinrite actually was for but never bothered checking.
Cheers Sir Dave of Garage
I've had SpinRite since 2005!
1989 for me , I was 18~
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 can't believe I never heard of this before. As an EE it makes sense. Just bought a copy thanks.
It makes no sense, the hard drive firmware computes and compares its own internal checksums, making any way the software is supposed to work moot..
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.
Dave, long time licensee of SpinRite here. Useful tool and I was also suprised to see the recent update. Excellent video!
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!!!
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.
Steve Gibson's software can work wonders and I have him to thank for a deeper understanding of soft- and hardware. Thanks for bringing Spinrite to the attention of more people, it can truly help with many disk issues
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 !
Very interesting. I have used Spinrite for many MANY years. Steve Gibson is an assembly coding beast. Great video!
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.
I remember working for a company specialized in recover data from hard drives. Spinrite and zero assumption recovery were our right hand. Utilities that i still use
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! 🇬🇧👍
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.
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.
Thank you for covering one of my favorite tools from the 1980's and 1990's. 😎 And I appreciate the notification that Mr. Gibson has a new version out! At some point I plan to upgrade to the latest version again. 🥳
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.
Awesome video, Dave. I was introduced to Steve Gibson ten or so years ago with SpinRite 5.
I have plenty of backup hard drives and old laptop drives that SR could benefit from.
I remember SpinRite from way back when and thought it was a great idea. I just forgot that I still need it !
Thanks for this one !
An interview with Steve would be cool.
Hi Dave, Thank you for the interesting and informative content on your channel. I operate a Windows 7 computer for my business that I constructed around 2011/12. It is rebooted every working day and my original boot drive finally failed earlier this year. I attribute it's long life to my semi regular use of Spinrite on all of my HDDs and SSDs. By the way, I had a clone boot drive already installed in the chassis and was up and running again in 5 minutes. I also have a duplicate computer at home which is kept up to date via Dropbox. regards, Marcus Wilson, Wellington New Zeland.
Amazing review, Dave, awesome detail on how SpinRite worked on electrical level, such a tribute to Steve's engineering skills! I've found out SpinRite when using earlier XT/AT clones with MFM drives (I still have one 20MB with its controller card but no old PC to run it). Optimizing disk interleave from 1:1 to an optimal relation was like magic (if I am not wrong interleave was not optimized on pre-IDE drives). Miss all the fun playing with it.
Great that you explained this tool to be a true masterpiece when some other youtubers suspected it was a fraud.
I'm running Spinrite 6.1 today. I listen to Steve's weekly Security Now podcast. Great stuff.
Excellent presentation. Thank you. Checked and found where my licensed copy of SpinRite 6.0 was bought in July of 2005. Incredibly, Steve allows download of the new version for free with your old license. Thanks Steve! Back in the day - 80's and 90's - drive issues like you describe were common and often. I remember doing a low level formatting and needing to input bad sectors, by hand, from the label in the drive. Today's stuff - both HDD and SDD - are just amazingly good in comparison.
SpinRite is a must for anyone into retrocomputing where spinning rust is the storage medium.
Interesting watch and something I have never considered having to do again in the modern world of tech!!!
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.
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 😂
i've used GRC tools for years! was great to hear his tool highlighted here.
I got my 6.1 edition! I've been using Spinrite for 40 years I think!
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.
Seeing the RK05 takes me back to days of the two PDP11/44 running the Siemens SPC telex exchange in Wellington NZ where I was working.
I received Steve's notice on the new version and wondered why I'd need it for the SSD drives. Now I know. Thanks.
Data degradation? Heck, Spinrite was originally about non-destructively low-level reformatting your hard drive in order to optimize its sector interleave! :D
Security Now is also a fantastic podcast whom Steve Gibson is the co-host of. I also bought Spin rite years ago.
Nice trip down memory lane for me. My first job as a programmer was at a NYC bank and the programs were on the DEC PDP 11/70. Some ran RSTS/E and we programmed in BASIC and some ran RSX/11 and was programmed in FORTRAN. When I left them to go to another bank, we used VAX 11/780. And eventually the Alphas. I recall my manager joking with the DEC field service guy about how easy it was to swap out an RA60 disk. The next time we had to do so, the tech let him do it. Easy-peazy. Granted, he had been watching him do it all those previous times so disconnecting cables and such made it easy for my manager.
I thought I had sub'd when I watched an earlier video. It seems I did not. I've fixed that bug. Oh, by the way, since I always ask YT hosts to not have any background music on the dialogue track, I feel it is only fair that I thank you for not doing so.
Holly molly, you still have it? Man, this SpinRite was my number one tool to fix my amazing 25MB hard drive! 😆
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
GRC has been with us since the start of the internet, happy to know they are still relevant
It isn't though.
1GB in the 486 era was a really big drive. In that era I started with a 105MB IDE drive but my last 486 ended up with a pair of 383MB ESDI drives. That was also an unusual amount of storage for a home computer. Now my home computer has 5TB of SSD and is running with about 2/3 of that storage used. I did own Spinrite but I never concluded that it was of significant benefit to me. It's one of those things that if it worked you'll never know how much improvement you got.
Right. I worked at a computer store in 1992 and 1993 when the 486 was introduced. We typically sold Seagate ST351A IDE 40 MB drives as the standard for high end 386/486 machines for home use (and the ST351A/X for those still using XT machines, which was still a thing). We would joke how Windows 3.1 took 10MB of the drive's space to install, calling it "The 10MB Solitaire Game". For those with a bit more cash, and businesses, we would install the Seagate ST3144A IDE 120MB hard drive. It was HUGE for the time. I probably built well over 100 computer systems during that time period using those two drives and upgraded hundreds more.
I remember RL02 discs used in PDP 11/34s at my first workplace - the computer room was impressive with lots of large boxes with flashing lights. We worked at terminals in the front area and the computers were at the rear of the office block. One day I had a call at 8am to say the office had burned down. Yes the whole lot had caught fire and we had a slow restart after that. The directors who owned the company must have had insurance and so out of the ashes, the company rose up again like the proverbial Phoenix and is still alive today and using desktop computers now!
I love those old drives with removable disk packs.
Wow, memory lane. Steve Gibson, SpinRite, software in machine language, his security podcast (was it called a podcast back then?). I was a HUGE fan. Lost track of it all but lately have been thinking about that software, but couldn't remember his name. Thanks, great timing on your part.
I used to listen to Security Now all the time! I remember they briefly called it a 'netcast' before 'podcast' took over as the defacto term.
i remember using spinrite back in the late 80's.
As a tech i still have an up-to-date license.
👍
When you started up those old hard drives, I jumped back about 10 feet! 😆
Big fan of SpiRite and 6.1 license holder ! thanks for doing this video
6:38 you could have also mentioned the fact that it can approach sectors from different directions with the read head and at different velocities :) clever stuff by Steve
WooHoo, Yay SpinRite! My favorite was the interleave reduction feature, which then chased me down the RLL controller option.
One of the few purchases I made was Spinrite in the 90s. Still got it.
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.
The haircut/style is epic! Hope someone dared you to do it!
I have to thank Dave for this excellent explanation of the new Spinrite 6.1 and why it is such a useful tool. As always, excellently done, clear and understandable.
I am currently in the process of convincing my wife that I need the new version, and thus a new $89.00 USD payment for the license. She isn't convinced yet, but this video may help in addition to the excellent walk-through recently done by Steve himself.
Being broke, and the wonderful difference between CAD and USD makes my wife shudder. I just see it as a necessary expense. I am sure I am not alone in this particular predicament when it comes to new tools. At least my wife knows about some of this and is willing to listen to my pitch. LOL
This following is just some personal advice, and of course you are free to use it or ignore it: When married, each partner should be allocated a small amount of money each paycheck to do with what they want. For example, maybe at each paycheck, each partner will get $20. This "mad money" can be immediately spent, saved, or a combination of both. The decision about what to do with this money will be up to each person, with no consultation with the other partner.
Marriage should not be slavery. A husband or a wife should have the freedom to make small purchases on their own.
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
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.
Really, really interesting video. Thank you for going through this.
New update and great program. GRC! Go Steve! Works, amazing program.
Oh the trip down memory lane with the D9090. That sound will forever be ingrained in my head. I miss my commodores.
Thank you for reminding me about SpinRite as a great utility.
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.
SPINRITE!! Love Steve Gibson!
Never heard of this program but it sure sounds like a good thing to run on my archival drives where I store things like photos and old tv series from my childhood that u can not find anymore anywhere. These drives are not used at all very often but mostly just sitting in a cabinet where I count on them safely holding all the stuff untill i decide i want to watch it again someday. A data refresh might indeed be a good thing to do on them.
Like you, I too have been a long-time user and fan of Spirited. I had not considered its use with SSD drives. Spirited got me out of many a pickle but given the MFM or RLL drives we then had, it could be a 24 hour or more process if the drive was large or if there were a lot of errors. I'll see what's new in 6.1 (I think my last version was 6.0) following your video. Many thanks for the nudge.
Spirited made me a lot of money back in the RLL/MFM days. I’ll have to go buy a new copy.
Have used Spinrite for decades. Great video
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.
Interesting that this video came out today, Steve Gibson had released a video a few days ago and popped up in my suggested videos. He also shows the importance of the Initial memory test before using SpinRite on a drive..
Despite taking literally days to complete a scan on modern drives due to their larger capacities, SpinRite has saved my bacon more than once.
One of the most significant changes in SpinRite v6.1 is its use of "flat real mode" which allows for 16 megabyte transfer buffers under real mode DOS. If you upgrade 6.0 to 6.1 (no charge even after 20 years) you'll find that a 2TB drive can be processed in around 3 hours total. No more "days and days"! 👍
The recently released update greatly increases the speed.
As a retired Network Engineer and Administrator I agree 95% of the techs today would not be able to function in the world we had back in the beginning. I remember using v3 years ago, and I recovered many a failing drive with it. Later we used v6 but by that time drive failures were so rare we hardly used it except for some testing. It is a great product and I wondered if they would ever update it again.
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.
Way to go, Dave! Great video!
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.
I was literally running spinrite when I saw your video. 2 more hours to go on my 1T spinning drive
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 🙂
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