GRC | Hard drive data recovery software

NOW SpinRite 6.1 – Fast and useful for spinning and solid state mass storage!

Since 1988.

It Works.

The best way to learn what SpinRite can do for you is to click the
PLAY button below to watch this interesting and fact-filled video.
Also, see below for news about SSD performance recovery!

You can't beat “Word Of Mouth” for explaining what something can do. And no one does a better
job of describing SpinRite successes than its own users. Be sure to check out some of the eMail
we continually receive from SpinRite's (often amazed and hugely relieved) new purchasers!

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 who 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

The original source of the text above, now at the Web Archive

See what customers who use SpinRite think about it,
and for answers to the most common questions . . .

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.

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.

If you are not already familiar with SpinRite's more than 35 year history of
seemingly miraculous data recovery, or if you are not sure SpinRite is for you, please
take a few minutes to read some true-life stories from SpinRite's users.

And now, 20 years later, SpinRite v6.1
SpinRite 6.1 was three and a half years in the making. Though it appears largely identical to 6.0, internally it was almost completely rewritten. SpinRite's traditional textual user-interface survived, but nearly everything else is new.

SpinRite v6.1's mission was to run internal PATA/IDE and SATA/AHCI drives at their maximum possible speed while further improving SpinRite's legendary data recovery technologies. SpinRite v6.1 does all that and more.

Amazingly effective for SSDs!
Well before work was started on this next SpinRite, we were receiving (many) reports of SpinRite recovering data from ailing solid state drives. That was surprising at first since everyone assumed that only spinning drives (“spinners”) needed SpinRite. But SpinRite's owners were finding that SpinRite could be every bit as useful for solid state technologies as for original magnetic data storage.

During the development work for v6.1 we discovered that, to our surprise, solid state drives (SSDs) were reading their data far more slowly in regions where the operating system, it's many files and the user's programs had been installed. Those regions are often written just once and then are read over and over again often without (ever) being rewritten. It turns out that solid state memory storage is well known (inside the industry) to not last forever... but that fact is skipped over in the advertising. And it's also known that reading from solid state memory actually “disturbs” the surrounding neighboring bits. An Internet search for the term “read disturb” is quite disturbing.

Check out the results from a Google search on the term “read disturb”.

By rewriting seldom written data, SpinRite resolves, eliminates and prevents Read Disturb:
Running SpinRite's “Level 3” which reads, recovers (if necessary) then rewrites has been found to restore SSDs that have naturally slowed down over time, dramatically improving their performance.

In the video below I explain more about how and why SpinRite is able to restore aging and slow SSDs to their original youthful performance:

The most common pre-purchase questions can be quickly answered by reading SpinRite's Frequently Asked Questions page. Please check it out!

To learn about SpinRite's history and much of its technology and capabilities, please see our existing, extensive, SpinRite web area and documentation.

Or read what SpinRite's past users have to say about the program and find answers to other questions you might have . . .

Or click this button to begin the process of upgrading or purchasing your own copy of the world's leading mass storage maintenance and data recovery utility . . .

Gibson Research Corporation is owned and operated by Steve Gibson. The contents
of this page are Copyright (c) 2024 Gibson Research Corporation. SpinRite, ShieldsUP,
NanoProbe, and any other indicated trademarks are registered trademarks of Gibson
Research Corporation, Laguna Hills, CA, USA. GRC's web and customer privacy policy.

Last Edit: Apr 24, 2024 at 15:16 (80.12 days ago)

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