Steve Gibson Read My Spinrite Question on Security Now

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Oct 12, 2012 1:03 pm

Heh. I've emailed him a few questions, but I never thought it would get read on the show.

It's around 31:30

http://twit.tv/show/security-now/373

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Fri Oct 12, 2012 1:07 pm

sweet, that must have been thrilling for you.

NubyCanuby_OFC · Post by **NubyCanuby_OFC** » Fri Oct 12, 2012 2:55 pm

He says "and Robert is exactly right" around 34:55. Now you have proof from the creator of SpinRite that your theory is correct.

b-man1 · Post by **b-man1** » Sun Oct 14, 2012 11:47 am

nice!...and good stuff to know. thanks.

darcy · Post by **darcy** » Sun Oct 14, 2012 3:35 pm

neat-o!

mile

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sun Oct 14, 2012 5:50 pm

Yeah, he has subsequently cleared that up since I sent him that email several months ago. Level 2 won't hurt an SSD, since it only writes if an unrecoverable sector is found, but the method Spinrite uses to recover a sector doesn't really work on an SSD anyway so a Level 1 scan is the best choice for an SSD. It just forces the SSD's internal error correction to asses every sector and if it sees one that's borderline, it will swap it out.

The advanced recovery tricks Spinrite uses in Level 2 & 4 are specifically designed for spinning drives. They force the heads to approach the bad sector from different angles and at different accelerations (actually it tries this 2000 different times) in the hope that it may get lucky and read that bad sector just one more time and recover it, or most of it. That's why it can take so long to repair a drive in really bad condition. I've had some customer's drives scanning for WEEKS.

The good news is that Steve is releasing a long awaited upgrade to Spinrite that will work better with non-standard SATA controllers, natively support faster drive speeds, and tweak a few other things.