Thoughts on a Mini PC Dedicated to Booting SR

[fje99]

I don't have access to a PC. All I have is an Apple Silicon Macbook Pro (and a couple of Qnaps). I have a bunch of drives I want to run through Spinrite. Looking at threads I see that there's activity on trying to get SR to run on Macs, but rather than go through all that (seems like a major PITA) ... I'm starting to wonder about just getting a cheap Mini PC to dedicate to running SR? And maybe use one of those cheap USB displays with it.

I couldn't find any discussion about this in the SR forums. Very much would appreciate thoughts on this from people more expert than me. Seems like for maybe $200 tops this might be doable.

 

[PHolder]

I couldn't find any discussion about this in the SR forums.

The keyword you wanted is ZimaBoard. This is the "mini PC" that Steve used to do development of SpinRite 6.1. Unfortunately you may have just missed getting the best price on one during Black Friday, but they're still pretty reasonably priced. If you have spinning media, you probably want to get a more powerful power supply, and that has been discussed in these forums as well.

 

[fje99]

Thanks. I will look at the Zimaboard threads.

 

[fje99]

also considering a cheap laptop. At least on Amazon there's a renewed Dell Latitude E7270 UltraBook for example for $150. Seems like maybe the way to go for a cheap dedicated SR machine.

 

[PHolder]

cheap laptop

Probably not a good idea. SpinRite 6.x does not support USB well, and you probably aren't opening up a laptop to install a hard drive into it.

 

[ColbyBouma]

I agree. A direct SATA connection is best for 6.1. My favorite setup is an old desktop with a hotswap cage installed in the 5.25" bays.

 

[fje99]

So maybe just an old desktop then. Plenty of those around. $105 Dell Optiplex 7040 small tower on Amazon.

 

[ColbyBouma]

Yes, that should work well. It's 6th-gen Intel, which should be old enough to avoid the UEFI compatibility problems, but I can't guarantee that since I don't own one.

If you're willing to buy used instead of refurbished, this one is $51.

Dell Optiplex SFF Desktop 7040 i5-6500 3Ghz 4GB Ram 128GB SSD Win 10 Pro | eBay

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[leilabd]

Older Dell PCs and laptops often had eSATA connectors. Used with an external 2.5"/3.5" docking station supporting eSATA (I have a StarTech one), they make quite a good Spinrite 6.1 setup.

 

[fje99]

I did end up grabbing that Dell 7040 on Amazon for $105. Worked like a champ. First 4TB drive took something like 42 hrs on Level 5 with dynstat 0. So I’m done waiting two days for a drive. Next drive is at level 3. Projecting 16 hrs.

 

[Jamie Cox]

I'm a Mac guy too. Don't be like me. I bought a cheap Windows laptop thinking I would use it to run SpinRite. Since I didn't read the fine print, it doesn't support legacy boot, and won't run SpinRite no way, no how. Apparently NO newer PC will. However, I have an older MacBook Pro which will boot and run SpinRite thanks to a workaround in these forums. However, performance is VERY slow on external drives. Any speed advantage of SR 6.1 is negated by using USB (even USB 3). Also, SR 6.1 won't even look at external drives 4TB and up in this configuration, even though MacOS sees them just fine on the same machine. I saw it work fine (but slowly) on several 1TB drives but failed to test 4, 5 and 8 TB drives that I tried.

 

[J.D. Gallaway]

I found myself with two of Lenovo's mini computers, same form factor as the 7040 above, both of mine sporting AMD Ryzen chips. Took a bit, but managed to get it booting direct to DOS with SpinRite on its internal NVME drive.