Newsletter Archives

• SpinRite 6.1 offers us help for solid-state drives

  Posted on December 16, 2024 at 02:43 CST by Ben Myers • Comment in the Forums

  BEN’S WORKSHOP

  

  By Ben Myers

  The latest version of SpinRite, long regarded as the go-to software to recover data from corrupted hard drives, adds testing and tuning of solid-state drives to hard drive rescue.

  Gibson Research’s famous SpinRite 6.0, circa 2004, recovers data from defective hard drives, repeatedly reading sectors to determine the original uncorrupted data with good statistical odds of success. SpinRite cannot possibly work on drives with failed circuit boards or drives that do not spin up.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.51.0, 2024-12-16).

  Ben's Workshop ClearDiskInfo, Newsletters, Performance, performance tuning, SMART, SpinRite, SpinRite 6.1, SSDs

• Our world is not very S.M.A.R.T. about SSDs

  Posted on February 7, 2022 at 02:45 CST by Ben Myers • Comment in the Forums

  ISSUE 19.06 • 2022-02-07

  HARDWARE

  

  By Ben Myers

  With solid-state drives (SSDs), the SMART ante is raised because an SSD can fail catastrophically — CLUNK! — without warning and with no possibility of recovering data.

  In my recent article “Hard drives — still pretty S.M.A.R.T.” (AskWoody, 2021-12-27), I was hardly overwhelmed by the treatment of the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data kept on traditional spinning hard drives by Microsoft Windows and the rest of the industry. But at least, if your computer started to hiccup, you could almost always look at the SMART data to find a possible cause.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 19.06.0 (2022-02-07).
  This story also appears in the AskWoody Free Newsletter 19.06.F (2022-02-07).

  Hardware Hardware, Newsletters, SMART, SSDs

• Hard drives – still pretty S.M.A.R.T.

  Posted on December 27, 2021 at 02:44 CST by Ben Myers • Comment in the Forums

  HARDWARE

  

  By Ben Myers

  In my last article, Breaking and entering with Linux: What you see (AskWoody 2021-09-27), I said that there were issues with the S.M.A.R.T. system built into the firmware of both old-time spinning hard drives and solid-state drives (SSDs).

  S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, hereinafter referred to simply as “SMART”) provides real-time recordkeeping about the health of your hard drive. It is all about system reliability, of which drives are a major element and a significant point of failure.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.50.0 (2021-12-27).

  Hardware Hard-disk health, Hardware, HDD diagnostics, Newsletters, SMART

• Freeware Spotlight – CrystalDiskInfo

  Posted on November 15, 2021 at 02:43 CST by Deanna McElveen • Comment in the Forums

  BEST UTILITIES

  

  By Deanna McElveen

  YOUR HARD DRIVE IS GOING TO DIE!

  German-born theologian Georg Hermes once said, “Death is like an arrow that is already in flight, and your life lasts only until it reaches you.” This also applies to the hard drives in our computers. But sometimes we get some subtle hints that the end is near … well, at least for our hard drives.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.44.0 (2021-11-15).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Best Utilities, Freeware Spotlight AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Deanna's Freeware Spotlight, HDD, SMART, SSD

• Tools for monitoring drive health

  Posted on February 3, 2020 at 01:15 CST by Tracey Capen • Comment in the Forums

  TROUBLESHOOTING

  By Lance Whitney

  Today’s PC storage media — traditional disk-based drives and newer solid-state models — are remarkably reliable.

  And that’s sort of a problem: we can become lulled into forgetting that they do fail — that there’s always a chance of a catastrophic malfunction, especially as the drive ages. So it’s good practice to periodically check your drive’s health and find potential errors before they result in lost data.

  There’s a plethora of utilities for checking the reliability and condition of both traditional platter-based drives and solid-state drives. Most use information gathered by the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T. or, simply, SMART) tools built into nearly every modern drive.

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 17.5.0 (2020-02-03).

  Troubleshooting AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Drive health, Drive utilities, SMART