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

By the way, this is NOT a sponsored episode. I'm just a 30+ year customer and fan of the app!

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Twitter: @davepl1968 davepl1968

[lanatrzczka]

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!

[drivenbydemons]

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.

[Darxide]

Steve Gibson is a treasure. Who else used to check Shields UP! religiously?

[michaelmeyer]

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

[robertcringely]

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?

[DavesGarage]

BONUS points if you heard me say "helpens deepen" :-)

[Kitejrpaladin]

As a causal viewer/listerner of both Dave’s Garage and Security Now.

I had to watch this video. Security Now just reached episode 1000 and a shoutout was given to your review of spinrite!

[aperson]

I another person mentioed, my bought a copy of Steve Gobson's software back in 2006. I am just speechless that Steve allows for FREE updates. I remember listening to Steve on one of his podcasts back in the day when he sadly mentioned that his wife left him because it was not in him to monetize on underdeveloped software. Apparently, many software companies produce underdeveloped software so later on they could monetize on updates. I am a true follower of his amazing skills and knowledge.

[FlorinBalanescu]

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.

[rhtcmu]

As a Chief Technologist for Seagate for years, SpinRite is generally done right. There are some errors in Dave's presentation but they are minor. The biggest thing that needs to be said is that if you wish to retain digital data plan to keep essential data on multiple drives that do not depend on each other (RAID is not a solution except for transactional data management or in disk duplication mode), and always keep a full dated copy or two airgapped -- meaning not connected to anything electrical. Safe deposit boxes are useful for this. And plan to make new copies on new drives every few years. Digital storage devices can fail in more ways than you can count and the ones that can preserve data for decades are really not commercially available and often give a false sense of security leading to catastrophic data losses. The design life of storage devices is generally 5 years although it is not unexpected that a given device will preserve storage for 10+a few years. Knowing what i know I buy new drives every year or so and make new full copies as well as keeping at least a couple of copies airgapped all the time. Lightning can, and does, strike. Fire (heat) demagnetizes. It is not true that solid state drives are not magnetic and susceptible to failures associated with magnetic field losses. Foldermatch is a great sister product to Spinright. Don't ever trust the OS vendors. There are some data storage technologies that may change some of my comments (e.g., graphene which is relatively immune to many failure modes) and Dave comments in the future, but some other ones mentioned here and the wonders of Spinrite and Foldermatch are unlikely to ever disappear.
Also, demand self-encrypting drives under TCG storage standards, and don't trust the software guys to get the security and privacy right

[TRS-Tech]

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.. 😂

[davidtownsend]

My gosh! I haven't heard the name, SpinRite, in two decades! Purchased, downloaded, and added to the toolbox. Thanks, Dave!

[Crushermil]

I've been a long time GRC fan and user of Spinrite but I have to admit I haven't kept up since SSD's came on the scene. Thanks for yet another great episode.

[gangsterHOTLINE]

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!

[ErrorCode]

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..

[farab]

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 🙂

[helmanfrow]

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.

[truetierra]

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. 😊

[garster]

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.

[ZathrusGizmo]

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! 😊😊