Tools.
These are just tools.
And I love tools, and I collect them.
And for me, my most important mechanical tool is a file, because it
help me build other tools.
"... Spinrite 6.0 faced the greater than 2tb limitation ..."
If I recall, the command line:
SPINRITE FORCE DYNASTAT 0
... would let SpinRite 6.0 'work' on up-to 2 TB of any drive, and that
often addressed my 'problem' and let me make an informed decision.
"... a 3tb TiVo drive to a competitor's product ..."
I presume
HD Regenerator from our esteemed colleague
Dmitriy
Primochenko via Abstradome DPOSoft.com.
Did it do the job?
"... Only one of my current 5 pcs is old enough to boot Spinrite; the
others are UEFI-only ..."
Yes,
Intel saw royalties going elsewhere and so abandoned purchases
of IBM-compatible BIOS from
Phoenix Technologies, American
Megatrends (
AMI ), and
Award Software. ;-)
"... To maintain them, I have to remove their M2 SSD modules and
connect them to the old PC via a USB 3 adapter ..."
If they are
M.2 SATA, of course they can go in SATA adapters and run
as fast as possible.
If they are
M.2 NVMe PCIe, then USB, and we're limited to USB2 sockets
... or virtual machine may work directly at higest speed.
Of course, once in USB adapters, a quick scan with
@Steve Gibson's
own free
ValiDrive will give a quick test and report across the drive,
and that works under a running Windows, even at USB3+ speeds.
C'mon, folks, run
ValiDrive on anythying and everything that can be
presented as USB storage - I have ValiDrive test
HDDs and
SSDs,
as well as
Kindles and such, all the time.
Of course
Linux and
Mac folks have always had to use workarounds,
creating supplemental tools, to use
SpinRite and now
Validrive.
"...This is suboptimal and beyond the capabilities of the typical
consumer, as is creating her own UEFI boot disk where it is even
possible ..."
Yes, also missing for newbies is the experience and savvy of
interpreting the process and results - what's normal, what's good,
what's bad, what's fixable, what's not?
Without experience, how would anyone know?
So we write into
GRC Forums and
GRC Newsgroups.
"... 6.0 was functionally obsolete for many years ..."
Sadly, Steve blamed the
BIOS for 20 years, but our own
@Paul F
recently discovered SpinRite 6 had a programming goof, easily
remedied:
https://forums.grc.com/threads/a-patch-for-a-spinrite-v6-0-overflow.1232/
https://www.grc.com/sr/kb/b04e.htm
"... disks exceeded 2tb and now 6.1 is in the same place because it
won't boot on most, if not all, Intel/AMD pcs sold today ..."
Hence, keeping an older computer to do data recovery and drive
maintenance.
Even with new computers under our fingertips, an old computer
somewhere to do maintenance for us has become a reasonable and
inexpensive avenue of self-support.
The original SpinRite target was
data recovery and
drive
maintenance in place, because computers and drives were
expensive, and few people had old PCs hanging around that could
pitch in to provide offline services.
Nowadays, almost everyone may have a spare PC someplace, and
old PCs can be bought on the cheap from many sources, so there's
that.
One of the best sequences I've used is to clone out using
ddrescue
on a
Linux boot
USB drive, letting it run multiple times until every
recoverable sector has been copied or proven unreadable, see
web search ddrescue for an overview.
Since drives are now cheap, there's no reason to worry over the
original
drive, I only wanted the
data.
But if we want to reuse a drive, and we want to verify a drive's qualities,
which I do for all drives,
new,
refurbished, or
used, then I use a cheap
old computer, and run
SpinRite Level 5, then read it multiple times
using free HDDScan from our esteemed collegue Artem Rubtsov, and
repeatedly run a complete read test over and over for a few days to see
if the drive degrades or stays responsive.
For me, old
SSDs often degrade quickly after SpinRite Level 5, but
HDDs seem to stay reliable afterwards, though I do have to
clean the
contacts between the drive's circuit card and the drive body.
But my
data has already moved on to a well-proven alternative
drive.
We all have our approaches.
That's mine, but it's flexible, dependent on the particulars of each drive
and tool.
I do not expect SpinRite 7 to completely replace my suite of other
tools or my variety of other procedures, because every drive goes
wonky in it's own way.
It's good to have alternatives, and I compare them to each other to
"test the test", so to speak, to build my experience of ... what's normal,
what's good, what's bad, what's fixable, what's not.
And it's good to connect with others to learn what other people's
alternatives are.
I look forward to
SpinRite 7.
I especially look forward to
SpinRite 7 development, as folks throw all
sorts of unexpected challenges at each beta test version -
SpinRite 6.1
development had a sequence of more than 100 test versions, plus the
evolution of support utilities along the way, such as
AHCI,
ReadSpeed,
and various drive and memory checkers, as well as the mini
Edit
program, and tweaks to
FreeDOS.
And the evolution of the industry will not stop, see
web search beyond NVMe and PCIe for a quick exploration of Compute
Express Link (CXL), GPU-Direct and DPU Acceleration, Molecular and
Sub-Atomic Media, DNA Data Storage, Holographic and 5D Optical
Storage, and Quantum Storage -
SpinRite 7 may address more than
we know today.
And there's old tech that's still in use, such as
Intel Optane, the
technology that would have satiated the AI industry, but it was before
it's time, marketed as expensive, and now no one is building it - who
else is doing data recovery and drive maintenance on Optane?
ValiDrive tested an Optane SSD in a USB adapter just fine, while
cloning software saw 0 bytes!
C'mon, folks, run
ValiDrive on anythying and everything that can be
presented as USB storage!
So hang in there, folks, keep using whatever tools and workarounds
we need, and know that if and when Steve gets around to
Spinrite 7,
it'll be a unique-as-ever Steve Gibson presentation, with features
and benefits only Steve can come up with during his deep dives into
the technology, seeing things as only Steve Gibson sees things.
