SpinRite prevents mass storage systems from crashing or warns the user of pending catastrophe. If SpinRite is not used until after a crash, it skillfully picks up all the pieces, recovers your data, and puts everything back together again.

SpinRite has had imitators. They've come and they've gone. But no other utility has ever matched SpinRite.

We know these are bold statements, but we're not making this up. See for yourself what independent industry experts have written and put their names to:

Running SpinRite periodically prevents disk crashes by containing any problems that are discovered. SpinRite examines the data storage surface of a drive one region at a time. It first reads the data out of a region, then exercises that region with patterns of data that SpinRite has determined are the most difficult for the drive to read and write. In this way, any weak and failing areas within the region are located and removed from use while none of the drive's original data is being stored there. Only after the region has been made absolutely safe, will the drive's original data be restored to that area.

This crucial process of testing the surface of a drive WHILE IT CONTAINS DATA is COMPLETELY UNIQUE to SpinRite. No other disk utility has ever done this.

Scandisk doesn't do this, nor does ANY OTHER UTILITY. Thus, no other disk utility is capable of working to PREVENT disk crashes as SpinRite can.

The SpinRite Defect Detection page tells the whole story about SpinRite's unique surface defect analysis capabilities.

Drives begin to fail when they have increasing difficulty reading and writing data that they once read and wrote without trouble. SpinRite reads and re-writes the entire surface of the drive, reporting everything it finds. Thus, it is able to provide early warning of increasing numbers of regions that are becoming troublesome for the drive. The drive can then be backed up and removed from service before a complete catastrophe results in loss of any data.

Since NO OTHER UTILITY analyzes the surface of a drive WHILE IT CONTAINS DATA, NO OTHER UTILITY can warn its user of imminent drive failure.

For example, Scandisk's "surface analysis test" is read-only and provides no exercise for the drive or the data surfaces. Just before a drive fails, Scandisk indicates that everything is completely fine, whereas SpinRite goes nuts showing the user that the drive is near death.

Which utility would you rather be using?

Post-Disaster Data Recovery is perhaps SpinRite's strongest and most unique capability since so much more can be done than any other disk utility has ever bothered to do.

Speaking of which, Scandisk is probably guilty of more data loss than any other utility ever created. Since everyone has Scandisk, everyone uses it. But few people realize that Scandisk does NOTHING other than discard any data that it can't read.

By comparison, SpinRite never takes a drive's data for granted. It contains and deploys an extensive arsenal of data recovery techniques and technologies which pull any drive's data back from oblivion. SpinRite is even able to recover most of the data in a sector that can never be perfectly read, and which any other utility software discards in full.

The SpinRite Data Recovery page tells the whole story about SpinRite's unique data recovery techniques & technologies.

We put a man on the moon, and a motorized skateboard on Mars ... So why can't we make a failure-proof disk drive? The answer, of course, is that we could. But the question is whether manufacturers should? You know that a more reliable drive is going to cost somewhat more to make, and therefore needs to sell for a higher price. But you can't SEE the reliability of a drive when you look at it. They all appear to be pretty much the same, so there's no way to tell that one drive will be more reliable than another.

Thus, from the perspective of the manufacturer, putting more reliability into their drives is wasted money, since no one will buy their drives for that reason. If one drive costs 20% more than another, say $239 instead of $199, and the drives are the same size and seem identical, wouldn't everyone save the $40 and happily take home a new drive for $199? Of course.

That's why, when you're in the business of making hard drives the first thing you learn is that ...

Therefore, NOT ONE DIME is spent on RELIABILITY beyond the barest minimum required. What we get instead, are drives that work "well enough" and are equipped with multi-year warranties to cover the percentage that statistically die sooner than is reasonable.

But what IS reasonable? Your prematurely dead drive is replaced for free. Thank you very much. But what about your data? Nope. There's no guarantee for your data. It's gone forever. Period. And if your drive happens to statistically outlive its warranty, then when it dies you still lose all of your data ... and your drive too.

It's clear that if you care about the data on your system's drives you must think of your drives as HIGHLY VOLATILE storage that's been manufactured as cheaply as possible. And since the drive's manufacturer won't take any responsibility for your data ... YOU must.

SpinRite is the only utility ever created exactly for this purpose.

Unlike most software developers, Steve began life as a hardware design engineer. Back before technology made personal computers possible, he was designing hard disk controller hardware and programming mass storage systems for large industrial computers. Steve was right in the middle of it, back in those nuts and bolts days when people really understood what was going on under the hood.

Thus, SpinRite was written by a hardware engineer and computer scientist who has long experience with, and understands, the deep technological underpinnings of magnetic mass storage. As a result, SpinRite "knows" precisely what goes wrong in drives ... and why. It knows how to keep problems from occurring, and how to cure drives that are already in trouble.

The links below take you to the other pages in this SpinRite region of our web site. Please take your time to browse around and read as much as you like. If you should choose to purchase (for $89) or upgrade an existing copy of SpinRite 3.1 or 4.0 (for $49), the "Purchasing Info" icon and link at the bottom of the page provides ordering assistance and directions.

From all of us at Gibson Research ...
Thanks for your interest in SpinRite!