Optimize Your Hard Drive and Extend Data Life - Including SSDs with SpinRite!

How does SpinRite differ from DOS chkdsk or Glary Utilities disk check utility?

really good video, nice software, but .... holy c... 89 dollars? that is too much for me who lives in Brazil

Defrag doesn’t apply to NAND, the data is spread linearly like magnetic storage. That alone puts the defrag argument in the dustbin… let’s not even mention the SSD controller, wear levelling, TRIM, redundancy etc…

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. 😊

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! 🇬🇧👍

There's some really terrible advice here. SSDs have a limited write cycle MTBF. You want to limit the number of writes. It make no sense at all to defrag an SSD as seek time is identical throughout. And there's no overhead in joining fragments. All you're doing is wasting unnecessary write cycles, and reducing the service life of the disk. No I didn't watch the whole video, i couldn't handle the brain cell effect, but I read the click bait and have a good idea of Dave's competence level. Your welcome.

Just wish this could be run on a new Apple Silicon devices

Over all I would say no. 98% of the time you should not need to but the other 2% of the time you need to is if you like to micromanage your pc.
What performance improves on a SSD or NVME drive? The $JRNL even though most often very small if you delete it or defrag it then you can can get a 2% up to 50% performance back to your pc. Defragging your .PST Outlook cache file when super big will also improve response time of Outlook. Yes yes yes it is true doing this will reduce the life of the SSD/NVME but I have yet experienced any crash or death of any of my pc's by doing this. Besides.... I get a new pc every 4-5 years anyway so I am very safe from wear and tear.

I can only imagine how many weeks that would take on a system with multiple 20+ TB disks installed...when I had to rebuild a RAID array with a 10TB drive it was something like 3 days before it was back in sync online.

Good luck de-fragmenting a SSD on a modern machine. I have a virtual disk enclosure with a SSD inside and due to limitations in the emulator firmware requires contiguous files. I had to find a Windows XP machine to successfully defrag it because most new stuff refused to run on a SSD and everything I searched for ended with "you shouldn't, it wears them out"

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.

Higher end SSD's will reserve a percentage of the space to help with the ssd slowdowns and write endurance. In production environments I like to reserve an additional 10%... just for good measure.

Sinve there is absolutely no correlation between a SSDs presentation of sectors and tracks and how the data is organised in the NVRAM, I cant see what 'defragging' could actually achieve. Other than sales of someones product...

Great video and totally agree!

Dave, Thank you for this walkthrough! Would you consider reviewing Validrive as well? It's the free utility that validates SSDs.

Interesting. I have not run Spinrite since my earliest days as a tech in the early 90s.

One of the few purchases I made was Spinrite in the 90s. Still got it.

I think I sense a video discussing the topic, TBW. 🤔

So how can you tell if say a 4 terrabyte usb drive with valuable data is getting close to fail?

One of the original releases of Windows 95 actually has a defective bit in the graphics content file for the game Hover.

I think the Win95 upgrade had the correct version, while the full install had a corrupted byte. The effect isn't noticeable while playing the game, but it's noticeable in a hex editor when you realize it's literally the only zero byte in the entire file.

Don't ask how I know this, but if you don't believe me, just go compare the files from Hover for the different releases of Windows 95 yourself.

Writing inverted data to an SSD does not do what this video claims it does. When you rewrite a data block on an SSD, it is almost always written to different storage cells. With SSDs, the logical address space (what the computer sees) does not have a fixed correspondence to the physical data cells.

Therefore, writing inverted data, and then rewriting the original data, just adds additional wear and tear on the drive.

Most modern drives are smart enough to properly handle data degradation in the background (as long as they remain powered up). If you want to use a drive for long term storage, non-powered, storage, then you may want to consider using a traditional hard drive.

With trump holding the mantle I believe there will be change, counting from "immigrant, price of groceries, gas, tax & most important inflation

That you for bringing that tool up, did not know it until today

Could you elaborate on NAS systems please. Older ones that run on some combination of RAID on, let's say, ext4 or newer ones that utilise fancier filesystems like btfrs.

* does it makes sense to power off NAS, yank out each HDD and run SpinRite individually on HDDs?

* does btfrs' data scrubbing do the same as SpinRite? (or is data scrubbing a Synology only thing.. 🤔)

Thanks!

How can you read the sensed analog flux value when the drive r/w head and controller abstract those actions behind an API?

Even if you write a driver, it's still at the mercy of the IC chips on the driver controller board -- it's only going to report read distinct bits as 1 or 0, not mag flux values.

Need to wait for SpinRite 7 to work on UEFI BIOS.

Ported to a Pi or arm, and connected directly to a "lone drive" with the appropriate psu, its fast and faultless. My next iteration will use an OLED display with "intelligible" text.
Journaling fs' kinda made "defraging" somewhat moot.
While Steve's code made it to market, mine squeezzed into the hdd's firmware, or that of a scsi array card, or BackPlane, or JOBD RAID Array, as tech progressed.
Ah yeah its all good fun, til its not.!
Data Safety is an Oxymoron. At best.!

WAIT A SECOND!!! I bought spinrite 6.0 but haven’t used it because I thought it only ran on Windows! I never got around to making a windows VM or bringing out one of my old PCs. I didn’t know it ran from the usb bypassing the OS!!! I listen to Security Now each week for years but somehow I missed this! Thank you.

The sound of that Commodore hard drive spinning up was awesome.

Like & comment, subbed long ago, GL to the magic 1,000,000

The real question is: how long does this process take? It looks as excruciating as waiting for a hard drive to defrag back in the Windows 95 days.

This whole thing about SSD is absolutely incorrect. As somebody who operates a data recovery lab, I want to point out a few things. First, all current SSD controllers handle cell refreshing. The normal wear level operation is much more efficient than this process. All this will do is shorten the life of your drive. The rewriting by the wear leveling algorithm actually explicitly targets old data, in an attempt to use the less worn cells.

This entire thing about recalibrating charge levels is complete silliness, as everything is, as above, shuffled around periodically by the garbage collector.

Edited for mobile dictation errors.

I ran a Windows Home Server, and later Windows Server Essentials with Storage Spaces and got hit with what I called Bit Rot but was more like the Degradation you mentioned. When trying to access files I'd get a CRC error.

Gibson is the GOAT, but I wanted something that could do automated checks without needing to take the server down. And with modern machines and file systems I'm hopeful the drive's firmware will detect any difficulty reading and do a sector refresh. So I purchased copies of Covecube's StableBit. It installs as a service under Windows can does automated full drive reads. I ran my last batch of drives with Storage Spaces for eight years and didn't run into the degradation issue.

Now I have a dedicated NAS running TrueNAS and doing ZFS scrubs. But I continue to have StableBit going on my main system. It did reveal that one of my NVMEs was dying as it started crashing the system when attempting to do the automated scan. I was able to get all of the data off that drive before it was complete toast. And so far, I haven't encountered that drive access slowdown overtime that I did see with some of my earliest SSDs.

Trump has to heal the economy first before I could throwdown $89 USD. I could just buy a new 1TB SSD

All my HDDs are apart of RAID Arrays whic SpinRite wont even work on.

Too bad it's not free.

If you run a full read/write of an SSD using SpinRite! doesn't that cause the drive to consider itself 'Full'? Is it worth running the 'Optimize-Volume' powershell command with the -ReTrim option if you do to ensure wear levelling doesn't get confused?

Spinrite. Now that's a name I haven't heard of for a while. I know a lot of people speak negatively of SpinRite due to the risks it can bring with corrupting data, especially on degraded media, and since a lot of people find software data scrubbing does a lot of the tasks needed.

Now if only Steve would update his DNS Benchmark tool and ShieldsUp! service to support IPv6. Love both of those tools!

Isn't there another program that supopse to stop you form losing your data too? I think it was called win something , the something part is unknown lol. its suppose to refresh your hard drive.

The guy that fucked up my adolescence before internet era... I found fdisk... I fucked it ( My sister computer... ). I have some cool rare parts... ;)

Why should I use SpinRite over the built-in Drive Optimizer and Defragmentation that Windows 10 already has?

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

Reminds me that I need to grab the new version from their site. It's been long enough that I don't mind paying some for an upgrade.

I got my 6.1 edition! I've been using Spinrite for 40 years I think!

Dave, I have a unique issue that I have seen on Dell latitudes from the XP era. Can you explain cleanly installing Windows XP and then installing Drivers? Everyone installs and works except the Microphone port on a Dell laptop D510. You have to do a driver install for audio, then you check it doesn't work, so you have to install it again in the device manager, then do driver rollback. Then it works only once you do a rollback, but not as a clean install; then the microphone works fine. explain in a video how a driver rollback makes a 3.5 mil aufdio mic jack work but not on a clean install please do a video on this issue explain how it works please I'm bafled as an i.t person I ran into this myself on my own machines

Defrag a ssd. thats bad advice, you should not do it unless you want to degrade it unnecessary by doing unneeded writes to it. there is no mehcanical operations in a ssd so dfrag is pointless. a ssd is a non-volatile memory.. its closer to a ram stick than a HD. you dont defrag ram do you?

I gotta dig out my copy of Spinrite and upgrade. The website asks for serial or email. Meh. Didn't like the bangpath address I would have had at the time.😂

That Commodore drive.... Tandon? It sure sounds like one.

promptly searches for commodore on ssd

I miss when stuff was analog and we could hack them with simple tricks to make our lifes better.

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.