Running Spinrite 6.0 or 6.1 Release candidate on a laptop connected to USB Docking Station with Drobo HDD

[Steve]

P.S. I hope you don't mind me posting here Steve and trying to get help from your very knowledgeable customers / fans

Not at all, Mark. Your experience with your Drobo 5N mimics my own. The way its hardware died was very similar. Our first suspicion is to mistrust what's supposed to be the least reliable component of the system — which are, of course, the hard disc drives... but after many hours of puzzling behavior that made no sense to me, I decided that something had gone wonky with the underlying Drobo itself. Fortunately, I was able to migrate everything away from it before it finally quit for good.

My move to the two Synology boxes has been the best thing I've done. I should note, however (for anyone who is interested) that I am no longer using Synology's own volume cloning system. I noticed that if I made a particularly large change to one of them (but not that large) it was apparently resynchronizing the entire pair, with many many many (many) unnecessary gigabytes of data exchange. So I switched to running SyncThing natively on both boxes and they are running SO well.

 

[dImpetus]

Rather than the USB dock, you might want to consider getting a ZimaBoard with a juiced up power supply to handle powering up a spinning drive. For under $150 it will be guaranteed to run SpinRite today, and in the future. (This is the board @Steve develops on.) If you're interested, search elsewhere here on these forums for Steve's recommendation on a juicier power supply.

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This is interesting and might be the answer for my use case. My primaries are Macs with ARM chips, and I have a Windows Machine, but it's a mini PC with no SATA connections. I want to use SpinRite on my Synology drives, but I didn't think I had any options.

Are there any tutorials on how it works?

 

[Steve]

Are there any tutorials on how it works?

It's quite straightforward. And the ZimaBoard has become very popular. If you check YouTube you'll find many videos. But for SpinRite's purposes you just attach the power, attach a USB keyboard and display, and plug-in a bootable SpinRite USB thumb drive. During boot you hit the DELETE key a bunch and you can override the default boot from the boot page... and SpinRite will run BEAUTIFULLY on any SATA drive you had attached.

 

[ColbyBouma]

If you want to be able to connect 2 3.5" HDDs to a ZimaBoard, make sure to buy a larger power supply. I think the recommended size is 12V 5A.

 

[dImpetus]

It's quite straightforward. And the ZimaBoard has become very popular. If you check YouTube you'll find many videos. But for SpinRite's purposes you just attach the power, attach a USB keyboard and display, and plug-in a bootable SpinRite USB thumb drive. During boot you hit the DELETE key a bunch and you can override the default boot from the boot page... and SpinRite will run BEAUTIFULLY on any SATA drive you had attached.

@Steve With a board like the Zima board, is it entirely out of feasibility for SpinRite 7 to be able to run on two drives in certain modes? Would help on really large drives

 

[Steve]

SR7 will DEFINITELY be able to multi-task. That's one of its key design points. It will run ALL of the drives attached to a machine simultaneously, with the ability to add and remove drives at will at any time.