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SpinRite has always been known for its ability to recover endangered spinning hard drive data. That capability has been further improved in SpinRite 6.1. But early in 6.1's development we discovered that SSDs were slowing down over time (we know why) and that v6.1 is able to recover an SSD's original performance.

See for yourself, below.

And for more about SpinRite's legendary data recovery,
please see 20 years of earlier testimonials from v6.0's users.

Stavros — email dialog on 2024/09/19
(In response to our mailing news of the free upgrade to 6.1 to all SpinRite 6.0 owners.)

“Steve, I love your commitment to your customers. Thank you for this. I have an SSD that's behaving badly. Curious to try this on it. -Stavros”

Later that day...

“Good evening, I just love this old interface. Brings me back to when I first started computing before I could read. I grabbed the dogged old drive and wow. See for yourself the before and after. Literal hundreds of mb/sec improvement. Very cool! I'm going to do this to a few more then leave a maintenance running on an old 1TB I use as offline backup. I really like the beeps and boops the software makes as well. Just a nice little touch. Thanks for this upgrade! Have a nice weekend. Stavros”

Opinions vary widely on the “beeps and boops”. (They can be silenced by tapping both SHIFT keys at once.) Where opinions do not differ is in SpinRite's success in restoring original SSD performance:
Stavros' SSD benchmark BEFORE SpinRite
stavros-before
Stavros' SSD benchmark AFTER SpinRite
stavros-after

Andy Anderson — email on 2024/09/17 @ 7:42pm
(In response to our mailing news of the free upgrade to 6.1 to all SpinRite 6.0 owners.)

Unbelievable Steve! I had an old laptop running windows 10, which I bought a new SSD for because I couldn't open explorer without it crashing. I backed it up to a HDD a while back and just haven’t had the time to fool with cloning it to the replacement SSD.

When I saw your email, I knew I had to give it a try. I’ve used SpinRite quite a bit over the years but never on a SSD. Check it out:

Andy's SSD benchmark BEFORE SpinRite
andy-before
Andy's SSD benchmark AFTER SpinRite
andy-after
GRC Note: Andy's experience would once have been surprising – but no longer. These reports are becoming commonplace as SpinRite 6.1 users use SpinRite to “refresh” their SSD storage media. And what's more important is that at some point “slow” may further degrade to “unreadable.” SpinRite may still be able to recover such data, but running SpinRite annually across solid state media appears to be extremely good for data health.

Sandor — email on 2024/08/25 @ 10:14am

Thank you for SpinRite. I have a ten year old Toshiba Satellite laptop. I installed a 1TB WD Blue SSD just over five years ago – the warranty just expired. This Windows laptop was acting sluggish. I could not immediately identify the issue. Ran down the checklist of items:

  1. Checked for updates and ran check disk – no problems.
  2. Checked disk optimization – barely any fragmentation.
  3. Checked the firmware on the SSD – it was up to date.
  4. Ran a quick SMART check – everything was okay.

I pulled out SpinRite and ran level 1 and checked my system afterwards. The sluggishness was still there. Thinking about what to check next, I remembered Steve mentioning SpinRite’s benchmarking ability. Ran the benchmark and the issue revealed itself – the front, middle, and end reads were way off (2.489, 17.224, 11.642 MB/s); see BenchmarkBefore.jpg. Ran SpinRite at level 3. After level 3 completed, I re-ran the benchmarks which showed how the SSD returned to its proper performance (564.353, 563.285, 564.222 MB/s). See BenchmarkAfter.jpg. The sluggishness I noticed is gone; the Satellite laptop is performing as I expect for a ten year old system.

Sandor's photo from BEFORE SpinRite Level 3
sandor-before
Sandor's photo from AFTER SpinRite Level 3
sandor-after

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.

Andrew Nelson — email on 2024/08/14 @ 10:37am

Hello Steve, Thank you for releasing the updates to SpinRite. I finally got around to downloading it and it’s working great. I’ve been scanning many drives that have been sitting in boxes due to incompatibility with hardware or software in v6.0. So far, I have not come across a drive I cannot scan, and the speed improvement is a game changer.

I had an old mini-PC (Zotac ZBox) lying around, so I removed the SSD, connected it to my Mac and copied the SpinRite image to the SSD. I put it back in the mini-PC and now I have a bootable, portable “SpinRite Appliance”. It just so happens this mini-PC has an eSATA port which makes for a handy way to scan drives at 3gbps.

Thomas Apalenek / @Tom_WA2IVD — via Twitter DM on 2024/05/06 @ 9:52am

Hi Steve. First, I have only one thing to say about SpinRite 6.1. Wow! I just ran it on a laptop's 1TB SSD. Laptop is faster and SpinRite is amazingly faster and now practical again on large drives. I appreciate that it's a free upgrade, but this just felt like too large of an upgrade. So I purchased another copy. Can't wait for 7 as I only have 1 machine left that isn't UEFI only. Keep up the great work.

Clinton Mills / @Clintonm9 — via Twitter DM on 2024/04/10 @ 9:52am

I wanted to share my experience with SpinRite after hearing about a similar case on your Security Now podcast. I've been struggling with my hard drive being extremely slow and unresponsive during the first 30 minutes after booting into Windows. It was a frustrating issue that I couldn't seem to resolve.

After listening to your podcast where you mentioned a user with similar SSD issues, I decided to give SpinRite a try. I ran a full level 3 scan on my drive, and to my amazement, it completely fixed the problem! My computer is now running smoothly, and the boot-up issues are gone.

Generally, I think people don’t understand all the potential issues that can come from SSD and the lack of visibility into what’s going on under the hood. Even talking to tech engineers in the field where we have previously used SpinRite countless number of times tend to think it can only help with spinning disk issues. SpinRite turned out to be a game-changer for my issue. Big thanks for developing such a killer tool, and keep up the great work on the podcast. It's really making a difference!

@jacksonmacd on 2024/04/14 posted to GRC web forum

I am currently in an RV, returning home after viewing the solar eclipse in Little Rock, Arkansas. It's a 2-month trip overall. I rely on my laptop for managing digital photos, but neglected to bring my copy of SpinRite with me. Of course, my Windows laptop "died" about 10 days ago - it would not boot at all. Windows Chkdsk got it running again, but it was horribly slow and virtually unusable. Then I listened to Steve's recent Security Now description of his woes with an SSD on Laurie's machine, and I realized I was experiencing the same problem. So I dug through some old emails (vintage 2008!) to find my SpinRite product key, purchased a new USB thumb drive (forgot to bring a spare!), downloaded and installed SpinRite 61, and set it working last night. This morning, SR reported that it had processed Level 3 on both SSDs. I rebooted the machine, ran the Disk Maintenance as recommended by SR, and the computer seems back to its old self.

Paul Kirsch 2024-04-18 @ 7:27am via eMail

I have been testing SpinRite and have noticed on some machines the logs did not have any issues recorded, but the machine runs faster in Windows, and sometimes shaves a little off the boot time. Are you able to explain this? I thought I heard this come up on Security Now once but can not remember what Steve said. Thanks

(The video at the bottom of this page explains how SpinRite is able to restore lost SSD performance.)

Herman Wolf on 2024/03/04

Hi, Steve, I promised my sister I'd thank you on her behalf for recovering her Windows boot drive.

This morning as I was preparing for work she texted me photos of a blue screen bearing the ambiguous 0x000000e error code. Remotely guding her through various recovery steps was proving futile so I headed over and prepared Windows boot drive and started a battery of the typical command-line and automated recovery tools, which was very time-consuming and ultimately futile. The machine would not boot.

I was going to be late for work and decided to give SpinRite a go because, after all, it's bailed me out of stranger jams than this so it was worth a shot.

I prepared a 6.0 drive and then remembered that 6.1 Release 2 was ready so I upgraded to that and set it running on all the volumes on the boot SSD (NVMe) while I left for work.

A couple of hours later SpinRite finished and my sister texted me a photo of the SpinRite screen, which showed no errors. I was a little concerned that no errors found would mean no errors fixed, but I've learned to trust the process, so I guided her through the steps of changing the BIOS back to UEFI and Secure Boot.

Naturally, the machine booted straight into Windows 10 as though nothing had happened.

I don't know what magic this is you have brought into the world but I'm sure glad it's here. I can't count how many times (since about 2005) SpinRite has performed wonders just like this.

Thank you, Steve, from me and my sister.

All the best,
Herman Wolf

@lamwilli, 2024/02/12 posted to GRC web forum

I’m a loyal Security Now listener and was happy to have an opportunity to use SpinRite. My son, a habitual Mac user, needed a Windows laptop for a new project. I had an old HP Pavilion machine that had slowed to the point it became unusable. Assuming the drive needed error correcting, I purchased a SpinRite license to check it out. I downloaded SR6.0, booted the laptop from CDROM and began a level 4 scan. SpinRite estimated it would take about 94 hours to process the entire 800GB drive. Wanting to give my son an answer in less than four days, I found a pre-release image of SR6.1, rebooted the laptop, started the scan, and went to bed.

In the morning, I saw that the scan had completed in less than 4:30 hours!

I rebooted the computer and confirmed that as good as SpinRite 6.1 is, Windows still sucks and there is nothing SpinRite can do about it.

SpinRite 6.1 is amazing. It clearly was a massive effort and deserves a higher version number. While my son isn’t getting a free Windows machine, I know that I have a solid laptop that will make a great Linux Mint workstation for my home lab of the local school.

Brad Kovach / @bradkovach via Twitter DM

Ran 6.1 today and it REALLY cooks. It also helpfully pointed out that my SATA 2 interface is slower than my drives and I had a few PCIe SATA 3 controllers laying around so I have had quite the upgrade today.

Congrats on shipping. It’s a great feeling, and it has been fun to be along for the journey.

@TedTheElder, 2024/02/02 posted to GRC web forum

Got RC6 today and ran it against a laptop I am repurposing.
WOW.
Fast and easy USB creation.
Had a scan running in 4 minutes.
Ran a scan at level 2 - very quick, compared to prior scans.
Ran a level 4 and it was also quick, finding a bad sector that was haunting me.

Well done to all the testers - it is clearly a quality product based on your efforts to find issues, and Steve's ability and doggedness to reduce the issues list to zero.

Congrats and thank you from a long time SpinRite user.

Ted

NEXT

For more (much more!) about SpinRite's legendary data
recovery, see the earlier testimonials from v6.0's users.




Click the left button to begin the process of purchasing your own copy of the world's leading mass storage maintenance and data recovery utility – NOW with the PROVEN ability to not only restore spinning hard drive data but to restore original SSD factory performance!

Click to purchase SpinRite v6.0     Click for answers to the most common questions

Thank you for your interest, attention, and consideration.


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Last Edit: Sep 22, 2024 at 09:37 (42.88 days ago)Viewed 36 times per day