What is the current best practice to run against modern storage using a Zima Board

[ross.dickson]

All of my production hardware is arm based so at the recommendation of other threads I've purchased a Zima Board however I'm still having trouble with all of my new storage device. Specifically I find that native USB C external SSD are very slow or don't work through a C to A adapter. The two different m.2 to PCIe x4 adapters make drives show up in the BIOS but Spinrite gives the red "This drive cannot be accessed" error.

Does anyone have known good ways to run spinrite agains USB C or NVMe m.2 media that doesn't involve buying yet another PC given that I use Mac and Raspberry PI as my daily drivers?

PS I have also tried a MinisForum pc that natively supports m.2 NVMe but is UEFI only and the boot spinrite from virtual box procedure not happy.

 

[PHolder]

I've purchased a Zima Board

Since you can boot SpinRite I presume you have an original Zima Board, not the new model 2. (I don't think they're direct selling the original any more, and unfortunately the replacement model doesn't support Legacy Booting.)

USB is not the optimal way to do any work with SpinRite. The DOS support for USB relies entirely on the machine's BIOS, and there are buggy and sub-optimal BIOSes in many machines. It's fairly rare for the BIOS to support USB 3 for example, which means it will be much slower than you'd hope.

It sounds like you've taken the obvious approaches with the Zima. You're likely going to have to deal with the slow USB. You might get the NVMe device to work, slowly, through some sort of NVMe to USB connection.

Unfortunately SpinRite 6 is not really well adapted to support of newer (USB and NVMe) type devices, but works quite well with SATA. Accordingly, if you can find any way to make a device work with a SATA controller you would be much happier with the results. Otherwise you're really stuck waiting, along with the rest of us, for SpinRite 7, which is expected to support USB and NVMe directly, and no longer be restricted to DOS and Legacy Booting.

 

[peterblaise]

Geesh, without Windows ... we can try Windows to Go on a boot
USB, and let ValiDrive do a cursory scan of USB devices - very quick,
and has 'woken up' some sleepy USB drives for me, and at least
confirms that my NVMe is superlative.

I run SpinRite 6.1 on USB3 storage devices, and NVMe devices in
USB3 adapters all the time - in USB2 sockets, because that's all BIOS
and FreeDOS presents to SpinRite.

Slow, but effective for data recovery.

Is it just a hunt for a BIOS, and USB chip-set, and a USB device that
all talk nice together, and the only way to 'know' is to buy it and try it?

Drive maintenance wise, nothing beats the speed of cloning, then SE
secure erase, and then re-cloning back in.

So, what are your goals for SpinRite - data recovery or drive
maintenance?

Do any of my suggestions from hand-on experience help you decide
what to try next?

 

[ross.dickson]

Yes I got the Zima version 1, got it long enough ago that I didn't know about version 2.

I'm looking for drive maintenance/diagnosis primarily which is how I've used spinrite for years. Until recently my storage was mostly sata, and always very slow over USB 2, but then 6.1 came and all my storage moved to USB C or NVMe (and > 1GB) so I'm back to slow. I've tried putting the m.2 into a UEFI only PC but Windows is really certain I want to initialize the storage (I'm sure it has data as the customer hypervisor it contains boots on an nVidia Oren but has odd failures, thus the goal to check the drive)

So far I've gotten two different m.2 NVMe to PCIe x4 cards that the zima board is happy to recognize, but spinrite hates. Now I've ordered a random m.2 to USB interface. I was hoping someone had found a set of adapters that are known good so that I don't have to play too many rounds of amazon roulette before I get a working setup. In the ideal world the chain of adapters not only works, but is reasonable fast, but even good old super speed USB would be good enough, I can let this run for a few days.

 

[peterblaise]

"... amazon roulette ..." - yes, but from anywhere - always buy with
return privileges.

Adapters are a crap shoot, so, yeah, it's buy-it-and-try-it and return
what doesn't work for you.

I use no-name USB adapters, and they are intermittent, sometimes
working here or there, sometimes not.

It may also be a "match the USB chip-set" challenge.

Regardless, SpinRite 6.1 wise, USB2 is all we're gonna get other
than SATA.

Folks suggest that the virtual machine route has allowed SpinRite
6.1 to 'see' NVMe at full native speed.

It's a lot of reading, but start here:

https://forums.grc.com/threads/how-to-run-spinrite-on-a-uefi-only-machine-part-1-of-5.1613/

Specifically getting to here and beyond:

https://forums.grc.com/threads/how-to-run-spinrite-on-a-uefi-only-machine-part-2b-of-5-windows-as-base-os.1615/

1. Decide whether to attach your virtual drives to either the IDE controller or the AHCI controller
   
   1. IDE Controller (listed as PIIX4 in the VM Settings)
      
      1. Pros:
         
         1. Faster operation (SpinRite native IDE driver works)
      2. Cons:
         
         1. Can only add up to 3 drives, as IDE only supports 4 total
         2. Logs will not be written until after the SpinRite session ends
   2. AHCI Controller
      
      1. Pros:
         
         1. Can have up to 30 drives (ports 0 to 29)
         2. Can log during operation
      2. Cons:
         
         1. Drives are seen as BIOS attached; SpinRite native AHCI doesn't work for some reason
         2. BIOS access may be an order of magnitude slower than IDE (or the same speed, you need to test and see!!)
   3. NOTE: The Host drive does NOT have be an actual AHCI connected SATA drive. I’ve attached NVMe drives, and internal MMC drives this way. VirtualBox seems to just present the drives via LBA, not CHS, so access is just by block address

 

[ross.dickson]

Thanks for repointing me at the directions.
Once it occurred to me to read the linux directions (which I use regularly) rather than the windows direction (which I don't use) for virtual box this was much easier.

Where I ended up:
Zima Board running Debian booted from the internal storage running virtualbox
NVMe ssd plugged into $9 NVMe to PCIe x4 card plugged into the side of the Zima
mapping the NVMe to the PIIX4 controller
level 2 is running and suggests it will finish scanning the 1TB drive in 45 minutes.