SpinRite

[lcoughey]

I cloned the same drive again with the RapidSpar Disk Imager. The previous 81 unreadable blocks have gone, it's now zero, so somethings happened, hmm interesting.

I can only assume that had this been a real Data Recovery case, 81 blocks of data are now gone, this clearly is not a real Data Recovery tool, but is still being marketed as one, and people are still using it, and losing data.

This is what I experienced too. I don't recall even requesting SpinRite "fix" the sectors, yet they were conveniently working without any data in them. I can only imagine how much data corruption has been caused thanks to people being told that SpinRite fixed the drive without any data loss.

[CrazyTeeka]

This is what I experienced too. I don't recall even requesting SpinRite "fix" the sectors, yet they were conveniently working without any data in them. I can only imagine how much data corruption has been caused thanks to people being told that SpinRite fixed the drive without any data loss.

Yes, and my own testing confirms SR 6.1 still does the same thing. However it only fixed the sectors when I used "dynastat 0", before that SR tried to recover them for 5 whole minutes per sector, and just gave up. RapidSpar confirmed those 81 bad sectors were still present. But I still need to see what happens when SR can/cannot recover sectors, what's actually written back.

So I'm grabbing more drives off eBay.

RapidSpar/DeepSpar/PC-3000 does Data Recovery the right way that's why we use them. SpinRite just keeps the user waiting while trying to battle with bad sectors on the FIRST PASS.

[fzabkar]

Dynastat is BS.

LSI and Seagate Develop Next-Gen Hard Drive Technology - written by storagereview July 1, 2010:
https://www.storagereview.com/news/lsi- ... technology

LSI and Seagate have co-developed an integrated read/write technology for Seagate’s latest hard drive products. In doing so the companies have created the first hard drives with a low-density parity check (LDPC) read channel in 65nm process system-on-chip (SoC) technology.

The companies combined Seagate’s LDPC digital back-end read channel and hard drive controller IP with LSI’s analog front-end read channel and physical layer technology and an ARM Cortex-R4 processor. Once integrated with high-capacity SoC solutions, it enables higher performance and higher capacity hard drives.

The 65nm hard disk drive SoC with integrated LDPC is compatible with 6Gb/s SAS, 6Gb/s SATA and 4.25Gb/s Fibre Channel protocols.

The data patterns that SpinRite thinks it is writing to the platters is not what is actually being written. This was probably the case way back in the 1990s.

[lcoughey]

Does 6.1 now clone the sectors it reads or does it still just assume that the failing drive will stay running forever?

[CrazyTeeka]

Dynastat is BS.

Agreed.

[CrazyTeeka]

Does 6.1 now clone the sectors it reads or does it still just assume that the failing drive will stay running forever?

It does NOT clone anything to another drive. It still writes the data back to the same drive.

[CrazyTeeka]

I'm going to check what SMART reports, using a different tool.

[fzabkar]

This is the summary of SpinRite's log. It's just too consistent to be a coincidence. If the first 7 sectors are unreadable, can the 8th sector ever be trusted, even if it reads without error?

Code: Select all

Sector 40,335,928 - 40,335,934     first 7 of 8

Sector 40,948,232 - 40,948,238     first 7 of 8

Sector 87,137,856 - 87,137,862     first 7 of 8

Sector 311,191,376 - 311,191,382     first 7 of 8

Sector 316,972,592 - 316,972,599     8 of 8

Sector 320,125,680 - 320,125,686     first 7 of 8

Sector 322,608,016 - 322,608,022     first 7 of 8

Sector 322,608,920 - 322,608,926     first 7 of 8

Sector 324,774,432 - 324,774,439     8 of 8

Sector 325,103,584 - 325,103,591     8 of 8

Sector 327,396,056 - 327,396,063     8 of 8

[CrazyTeeka]

SpinRite Confetti + Other Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@mvidsplus/videos

[CrazyTeeka]

R-Studio has access to some useful drive information...

Size: 465.7GB (976773168 LBA)
Logical Sector Size: 512
Physical Sector Size: 4096

SMART LOG: