What SpinRite does

Take a moment to consider this: Whether data is stored magnetically on spinning magnetic discs, or electrostatic charges in SSDs and other flash media, mass storage devices have no way of determining how well 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 quickly & easily. Until then, it must be taken on faith.

This is one reason for SpinRite.

SpinRite rapidly 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 SpinRite recovered will be rewritten, possibly into a new location on the media for safe keeping and trouble-free reading when it is needed.

And SpinRite speeds up older SSDs!

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.

Look at this “before” and “after” performance recently reported by a SpinRite 6.1 user:

Another SpinRite user had an SSD in even worse (barely functional) shape:

This was a 5 year old Western Digital 1TB SSD. The front of the drive was reading at 2.489 megabytes/second, the middle at 17.244 and the end at 11.642. After running SpinRite at Level 3 over the drive, its original factory performance was fully restored to 564 megabytes/second.

You can find Andy's, Sandor's and others' original reports on SpinRite's testimonials page.

Although the video below was made back in 2012, during the weekly Security Now! podcast in answer to a question asked by one of the podcast's listeners, it remains true to this day. What SpinRite does has only become more important and true with passing time:

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 more 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.

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.

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! Check out that page and Don's great site.