SpinRite

[lcoughey]

A while back, I posted a blog about SpinRite at the following link - SpinRite - A Data Recovery Program?

The other day, we had a drive that was failing MHDD testing. For the fun of it, we ran SpinRite on the drive to see how it would do. It ran for a day and when it completed, it reported the drive as healthy. We re-ran MHDD and, as you can see, the drive isn't quite as healthy as SpinRite reported.

After SpinRite Passed.jpg (151.14 KiB) Viewed 87541 times

[Jared]

Nothing quite like SpinRite to mask symptoms, tell you all it well, and give a false sense of security.

Yet the guys who love this program will tell you you're wrong about it, even after they kill someone's drive using it.

[lcoughey]

Yeah...seems like people will believe it works just because it says it will, even though the evidence shows that it is snake oil.

[pclab]

I still see this software running on some computer stores to repair HDD's

[lcoughey]

Here is another scary screenshot from SpinRite. What happens when each of those partially recovered sectors are from a critical database file. After the sector has be remapped (partially recovered), there is no way to go back and get anything that was lost. This is called data loss, not recovery.

SpinRite_Remap.jpg (150.7 KiB) Viewed 87429 times

When a data recovery professional recovers your files and encounters bad sectors, we don't alter them...we do everything we can to get that sector to read and copy to another drive. If we need to, we can get the same partial data that SpinRite gets, but the difference is, if the data in the sector is critical, we can keep going back in hopes to get a better result.

[CrazyTeeka]

SpinRite 6.1 is being developed. I plan to test it to see if it's still snake oil. You could do the same if you have time.

[pclab]

SpinRite 6.1 is being developed. I plan to test it to see if it's still snake oil. You could do the same if you have time.

I don't think so eehhehehe

[CrazyTeeka]

No worries. I have the time to check it. It's likely to still be snake oil. I just wish to confirm it for myself.

[lcoughey]

They have been saying this for a long time....it is only 20 years or so since the current version was released.

[Joep]

Yeah, I notices he's working on an update. SG should stop marketing it as a data recovery tool and it would be much less of a problem. In itself his study project in preparation for nextgen Spinrite, ReadSpeed (benchmark) is interesting as it reveals interesting (IMO) stuff about for example SSD performance.