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I’d be very careful & cautious in using SpinRite as mentioned by this person:

https://www.disktuna.com/and-now-im-done-with-steve-gibson-and-spinrite/

Owners of SpinRite version 6.0 (such as me) got 6.1 at no extra charge. However, owners of version 6 (and presumably 6.1) will be able to get the next version, 7.0, at an unspecified “reduced price“.

Looking around a bit, it seems that decades ago, Steve charged $39 to licensees of SpinRite 3.1 or 4.0 who wanted to move to the then-new version 5.0. (Note that the full price for new owners was $89, where it still is today!)

 

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Sueska

@Sueska, I paid $89 for SpinRite when I bought it going on two decades ago. The price has been the same ever since I became aware of the program. Not sure where that $65 figure came from.

 

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Sueska

Ben, When I went to purchase spinrite 6.1 as a first time buyer, I am seeing $89.00 and not $65 + tax as stated in your article. Did the price go up? Thank you.

@wavy, what do you mean? SpinRite 6.1 is the new version, released earlier this year.

A SpinRite 7 has been promised, but I don’t remember Steve Gibson (the developer) giving a time frame for its release.

 

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wavy

heretick wrote:

Could I use SpinRite to recover a SSD drive that Win 10 has somehow suddenly stopped recognizing? All File Explorer shows now is one big C drive (contains OS), but the former larger partition D drive (all saved data) is no longer visible/appears to no longer exist

It sounds like your SSD may have developed some kind of problem with the drive’s formatting and file index. Others may have a better diagnosis, but if what I said is the case, then I doubt that SpinRite will help with your issue. SpinRite is designed to “refresh” sectors where the data signals have weakened and are in danger of being lost. It’s designed to fix weak data sectors, not drive formatting gone bad.

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heretick

Hello all, real noob here. Could I use SpinRite to recover a SSD drive that Win 10 has  somehow suddenly stopped recognizing? All File Explorer shows now is one big C drive (contains OS), but the former larger partition D drive (all saved data) is no longer visible/appears to no longer exist … 

Thank you for any light you can shed on this – sorry for my noobiness!

Paul T wrote:

You need to justify this claim. What evidence do you have?

cheers, Paul

You are welcome to read e.g. this thread at https://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2929 or many others. SpinRite may actually harm your data recovery efforts by doing writes/erases on already damaged media, or it will just return random garbage, or… Most of the marketing claims are really just – pseudoscience and pure snake oil.

Do yourself a service and use something like ddrescue for your data recovery attempts. In addition, the basic principle here being to offload the data somewhere else, not to mess with faulty media.

SpinRite 6.1, the newest version, can handle multi-TB drives, subject to BIOS limitations. See this post by Steve Gibson on the GRC Forum:

There’s no maximum for SpinRite. Some early testers used 16TB drives, and I have one here that works nicely.

By the way, SpinRite 6.1 also runs much faster than 6.0.

 

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Hey Ben,

Nice article and got me to dig out my Spinrite 6.1 USB and play a little.

I noticed that if you are using an EXTERNAL USB drive enclosure:

1. Spinrite may not recognize a drive in certain USB enclosures. No problem with others.
2. When trading USB devices you need to have them connected then RE-BOOT from the Spinrite USB to have the device recognized.

So far I’ve done one 500 GB WD 2.5″ drive on level 2 (it’s old and wanted to fully check it’s integrity) a Crucial 128 GB SSD on level 3 (this one has had problems in the past and eve had it’s cover lifted to look inside. It’s now held together with packing tape). It worked fine. I currently have a 1 Tb 2.5″ HDD running on level 3, time estimate 13+ hours!

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

Ben, I think I’d agreee with anyone that the Spinrite 6.1 write up is not totally clear!

Personally I think I’ve deduced that the Spinrite 6.1 update only works ‘properly’ with direct SATA interface SSDs and not with USB or Nvme ones. The FAQ for Spinrite does explain this, as the 6.1 version requires a BIOS boot. Although the code apparently has direct PATA and SATA interface drivers, it relies on BIOS interfaces for USB and Nvme which slow it down! That’s why your NVME performance figures don’t seem to be ‘right’.

We all need to wait for Spinrite 7.0 which will ‘UEFI boot’ and have native USB and Nvme drivers to perform ‘properly’ for a true evaluation.

Julian

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rbailin

The apparent reason is because firstly, SSD drives emulate disk drives in that the OS treats them like HDDs using LBAs [Logical Block addresses].  HDDs and SSDs are treated as if the device has a consecutive set of blocks starting at LBA 0 and ending at LBA n [where n depends on the drive size].

Low number LBAs are at the ‘front’ of the drive, high number LBAs are at the ‘end’ of the drive.

OS systems tend to allocate data with low LBA numbers first so the device  slowly fills up from the ‘front’ to the ‘end’.  So typically Windows is installed at the ‘front’ and other ‘stuff’ at the middle or near the ‘end’.

The final part of the explanation is that SSD data has been found to deteriorate so the ‘read only’ predominant nature of Windows files means that portion is likely to deteriorate more than at the ‘end’.  The ‘middle’ and ‘back’ blocks to be rewritten more often and their ‘quality’ is restored.

I think the deduction is that the SSD read rate across the drive is consistent with the interface performance, but what you see at the ‘front’ is the hidden drop in performance by the hidden read retries by the controller due to ‘bit deterioration’.

It’s well worth fully reading the Spinrite FAQ pages…

Regards – Julian

 

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TechTango, rbailin

I’ve been a subscriber to SpinRite since I think V3.1, still have it.

For my everyday machines I monitor the SSDs with this: https://www.hdsentinel.com/

Dynamite program and the developer is VERY responsive.

For the record, I’m just a happy customer, I have no affiliation w/ the company.

Jim

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Rand Alonin, Cybertooth

I recently bought Spinrite only to find out after the software arrived that it doesn’t work on any drive exceeding 2 TB (they don’t seem to advertise this fact).  I don’t think anything has changed since then. When I complained about the deficiency they refunded my money, but I wasted a lot of time finding out something that should have been  stated on the top of the page.  I like the concept of Spinrite, and if they have fixed this issue, I would buy it again.  You should have mentioned this in your article (unless I missed the mention, or you also didn’t know).

Check with a few data recovery specialists on well-known, well-respected data recovery discussion boards and with their companies.

A while back, there was very in-depth, thorough documentation about how many recent hard drives, hybrids, solid states, etc., work.  Also, caution was encouraged about Spinrite 6.0 and 6.1 and other similar products.   Caution is necessary because such products might clash with the low-level workings of recent and present-day hardware.

I have used Spinrite 6.0/6.1 in my 100MB+ hard drive/DOS 3.3/Windows 3.11 days.  It was a hard drive report card tool for me.

Test on non-critical hardware before using such products on business hardware.

 

 

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted