SpinRite Product Demo / Video Walkthrough

What SpinRite does

Data Recovery  &  SSD Performance Recovery

Take a moment to consider this: Whether data is stored magnetically on spinning magnetic discs, or electrostatically in SSDs or other flash media, mass storage devices have no way of determining whether the data that was once written can still be read today unless they are asked to do so.

It is only when a mass storage device is asked to read its data that it's able to discover whether or not that data is readable – and how easily. Until then, it must be taken on faith.

This is the first reason for SpinRite.

SpinRite scans spinning or solid-state mass storage media to verify, restore, repair and improve its current readability. If anything is found to be amiss, SpinRite's legendary data recovery technology gets to work, often pulling unreadable or barely readable data back from the brink. If this seems difficult to believe, how many thousands of testimonials would you care to read from past SpinRite users?

Once the endangered data has been recovered to the best of SpinRite's ability (which far exceeds any other known utility), what it recovered will be rewritten, possibly into a new location on the media for safe keeping and trouble-free reading when it is needed.

Here comes the second reason for SpinRite...

Does your SSD-based system seem to be running slower than it did when it was new? If so, it may not be your imagination.

We've learned that even when solid state mass storage can be read, storage that is only ever read and rarely written, such as most of operating system files, become more difficult and slower to read as time passes. So well before the data becomes unreadable, a machine's performance can be significantly impacted. SpinRite can refresh and restore solid state media to “like new” performance.

Here's one user's “before” and “after” results:

As shown above, SpinRite measures any drive's read performance at the front, middle and end of the drive. Here we see that Andy's SSD – even though it is “solid state” and we assume it would not be affected by things that might slow it down – was initially reading at 141.7, 149.3 and 272.8 megabytes per second before running SpinRite at level 3 over the drive. Afterward, as shown by Andy's “after” photo, its original performance has been restored and it's now reading at around 554 megabytes per second everywhere.

Check out SpinRite's User Feedback and Testimonials page for more examples of its benefits for solid state storage.

The view from Windows

SpinRite 6.1 is a 250KB program that runs under Windows and FreeDOS. SpinRite is run under Windows to create bootable media — normally a bootable USB “thumb drive”:The bootable media created by SpinRite under Windows includes FreeDOS and is pre-configured to run SpinRite when it is booted on any PC-compatible (Intel/AMD) machine which can boot from USB, CD or diskette (and even on many Intel-based Apple Macs). Since SpinRite 6.1 is a DOS application, which requires BIOS-compatible firmware to boot, please see the Will it run on your machine? page to answer that question. Since SpinRite 7 will also run on UEFI machines, you may sign-up to receive eMail news of future SpinRite releases.

Three independent reviews

An Independent Review of SpinRite 6.0 KickstartNews recently reviewed our new SpinRite v6.0. Here's a piece of their experience . . . The opportunity for the first test appeared only one day after we received our copy of version 6. An 80GB hard drive on one of our busy storage servers decided to pack it in. Prior to trying SpinRite we were still able to access the drive intermittently but it was impossible to copy data or run a file undelete utility. A handful of important files had been written to the drive subsequent to the last backup the previous night; files which we needed within about 48 hours, which meant that a professional data recovery service (with its three week backlog) was out of the question. We removed the drive and installed it in an identical hardware configuration, then booted SpinRite 6 from CD and did a Level 2 recovery (see above for recovery level definitions). After 22 hours, SpinRite completed its work and pronounced the drive fully recovered. We reinstalled the drive in the original server. It ran perfectly, the research assistant who had created the required files copied them off the drive and that was that. Nice job SpinRite 6. The drive was still running fine as we went to publication with this review two weeks after the incident. We used a level 2 setting in SpinRite: Recover Unreadable Data. You may read  the entire SpinRite 6.0 review  at Kickstartnews.

Don Watkins talks about SpinRite & me One of the founding fathers of the PC revolution, Don Watkins, made some room on his site to talk about my work and SpinRite 6.0.  Thanks Don! In my last 30 years in computing I've met very few programmers that I consider to be genius at it. Specifically I can recall four. Oh, that's not to say there aren't a lot of really great ones out there, but these are the guys I ran into. What do I consider the mark of a great programmer; someone that can take a general idea and turn it into tight code and if it's just a quick and dirty program, do so in a manner of hours. Secondly they write truly elegant code; I can brute force something in 400 lines and they could do the same function in 10 lines. Thirdly they're good in multiple languages which includes assembler. If you've never coded assembler believe me, you need a GREAT mind to do it. Finally they have a built in sense of what a good user interface should be. Because I share none of these traits yet still have an appreciation of what's involved to get there I greatly admire the talents of these folks. Among the four includes Steve Gibson. He's written a slew of great programs; ShieldsUp, Shoot the Messenger, UnPlug 'n Play and DCOMbobulator. He's written columns and a collection of same titled "A Passion for Excellence". I think that the title of his collection describes Steve perfectly. Oh, I've disagreed with him on some issues but I always, always respect his position and frankly I suspect that if we debated our differences he'd win. Out of respect for my ego I don't debate Steve. By far Steve's magnum opus is SpinRite, which I've been using for so many years I can't recall when I first started using it. What is SpinRite? First it incorporates Steve's theory that it's not if a hard drive will fail, it's when. Second it includes his coding and third it'll likely save your hard drive's bacon. SpinRite, which is distributed as a single 170Kb file (yes, that's right, 170Kb which shows you what writing code in assembler can get you; tight code) gets "down to the bare metal" of a hard drive and verifies and tests the physical magnetic media and warn you (as well as fix) of impending problems BEFORE they happen. If you have lost data SpinRite may be able to do CPR on the damaged media and bring the data back to life. Other features, such as drive benchmarking, are icing on the cake. SpinRite is totally non-destructive nor does it care about your operating system; it boots from a floppy it creates so it'll handle just about any disk format including NTFS. SpinRite, along with Steve's other (free) programs, is available for $89 from the SpinRite web site. Upgrades for users of previous versions, and I do strongly recommend the upgrade to version 6, are available at a discount from the full price. Of a couple of tools you'll want in your fight against the evil forces of computers you'll want SpinRite on your side. Don't compute without it. -- Don Watkins Check out that page and Don's great site.

A review with Great Screen Shots Leon Goldstein wrote a SpinRite v6.0 review for the Linux Journal. Leon's review includes shows some great screen shots of SpinRite in operation. You may read  the entire SpinRite 6.0 review  at The Linux Journal.