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Longtime SpinRite customer and "Security Now!" listener, but my first post here.

I heard about ValiDrive from Steve's podcast a few weeks ago, and this week was the first time I had a special reason to try it. We use Windows Media Center, and I was offloading a World Series game for storage on a different computer. Halfway through the copy operation, the 128GB flash drive I was using suddenly disappeared from Windows Explorer and the copy operation stopped.

After fruitlessly trying a few things on that computer, I disconnected the flash drive and took it to my office for deeper investigation. Attempts to reformat the drive began normally, but would come to a halt at some point. I started wondering if this might be one of those flash drives with improperly reported capacity, so I downloaded ValiDrive and ran it on the flash drive. Here are three screenshots showing what ValiDrive reported:





Next, I ran a level 2 SpinRite scan on the flash drive. The program was humming along, until it reached the 60.74% point when it slowed down to a crawl, only updating the display after literally several minutes each time. Eventually I gave up, figuring that at the current rate SpinRite would take months to complete. It never did report any bad sectors, all the squares on the Graphic Status Display were white. (I can upload photos of some of the SpinRite screens if needed.)

So finally I put Hard Disk Sentinel to work on the flash drive. Below is what that program reported. The first image was taken at about the moment that HDS visibly slowed down, while the second was taken after it finished:




At this point, I have no expectation that the "missing" capacity on that drive can be reclaimed. But I am curious what could be going on with it. Was the capacity reported wrongly all along, or did something happen to the drive? I'd had the drive for a couple of years but had never previously filled it past the halfway mark.

Any ideas or insights will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks, here's the output from that program:

Volume: K:
Controller: Unknown
Possible Memory Chip(s): Not available
VID: 21C4
PID: 0CD1
Manufacturer: Lexar
Product: USB Flash Drive
Query Vendor ID: Lexar
Query Product ID: USB Flash Drive
Query Product Revision: 1100
Physical Disk Capacity: 124623257600 Bytes
Windows Disk Capacity: 124623155200 Bytes
Internal Tags: JC2F-QAFJ
File System: NTFS
Relative Offset: 96 KB
USB Version: 3.10
Declared Power: 504 mA
ContMeas ID: 020D-01-00
Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 x64 Build 7601
------------------------------------
Program Version: 9.4.0.645

My security applications jumped so fast on ChipGenius, I didn't get to the point where I could download the file. First I tried the website in your post, and I was blocked from visiting it. Then I found the program on Softpedia, but then my AV (Bitdefender) prevented the download.

Any other utilities that will do the same thing but not ring alarm bells?

magnificent_starfish said:

This isn't very conclusive. Well it is end it isn't sort of ..

It is: The drive is bad probably, degraded NAND. We see it get slower and then eventually return read errors only.

It isn't: We see at some point speed drop and then read errors only. At some point HD Sentinel complains about file not being found. In Windows the drive is treated same way as a file, so essentially HDS tells us the drive can not be found. This is typical for flash drives with degraded NAND: Degraded NAND poses problem for the drives firmware, firmware get's pre-occupied with that until Windows decides it's taking too long for the drive to respond.

I have had plenty of USB flash drives or memory cards sent to me for data recovery. Chances are that lot of the sectors in the red area can actually be read but it takes some experimenting which ValiDrive or HDS don't do. Often a red sector can then be read without significant issue, which to me is a clear indication it's not the sector that is bad, it is the firmware "going stupid".

In my experience this isn't typical behavior of a "fake USB Flash Drive", it's typical behavior of a degraded drive, the NAND specifically and cascading issues that are a result of that.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the analysis. Fortunately, the flash drive doesn't have anything irreplaceable on it, so maybe I'll just keep using it until it fails completely and then throw it out.

fzabkar said:

My own software triggers these heuristic scanners. I don't know how developers deal with this.

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The answer to your question is: Not easily. It's a true pain in the butt. One thing I learned during the ValiDrive work was that delaying any network activity after launching is a very useful thing. Some of the A/V technology actually runs the code in a sandbox to watch its behavior. I use a UDP ping in the form of a DNS lookup for version checking since it's universally available and minimal overhead & impact. So, ValiDrive was emitting a DNS query when it started up to check for a newer release... but this was triggering a much higher degree of false positive A/V detection. So now at startup, ValiDrive checks the date of its own executable and only emits a version check if the code is at least four week old. I didn't expect that little change to have nearly the effect that it had, but it immediately made both Google and Microsoft completely happy where previously they were going nuts.

FOLLOW-UP: Last night, I downloaded Spinrite 6.1 Pre-Release Candidate 5.1 to see if it would help with this flash drive. This time, the level 2 scan got as far as 60.9037%, which FWIW is 0.12% more than SpinRite 6.0 had managed to reach (60.78%).

However, at this point the scan stopped with a “This drive has taken itself offline" message (no more words in the message after "offline") and a request to power-cycle it. But when I rebooted into SpinRite, it couldn't find the problem Lexar flash drive -- it's no longer showing up on its list of mass storage devices discovered.

Curiously, Windows still does find the flash drive and assigns it a drive letter.

Would it be fair to say that the flash drive is just getting worse and worse?

JorgeA said:

Would it be fair to say that the flash drive is just getting worse and worse?

Click to expand...

Most likely.

I have some old, s-l-o-w, cheap flash drives that did NOT take kindly to an SR L3 run (L1 and L2 runs were fine) and appeared to "curl up and die".

I tried re-InitDisking them (nothing to lose). And Lo! InitDisk apparently "resurrected" them. They became functional and bootable again. The latest WinSpin dev release then made them fully functional SpinRite boot drives with RC5 on them.

I will never try SR L3 on then again, nor will I ever use them for anything important data wise. But they now appear to be fully functional normal SpinRite boot drives. And one of them was an old Lexar. I will keep them around for possible further SR testing.

JorgeA said:

However, at this point the scan stopped with a “This drive has taken itself offline" message (no more words in the message after "offline") and a request to power-cycle it.

Click to expand...

Hi @JorgeA :

There are two different ways SpinRite might declare that a drive has gone offline:

1. One is when the drive fails to return online following a reset. SpinRite now (since pre-release 5.01) will wait much longer — 60 seconds instead of 10 seconds — for drives to "come back". But that is not what happened on the drive you have...
   
   
2. The other way for a drive to take itself offline is for it to declare a "Device Fault" condition, after which it will shut down all communications and go inert. The only way to bring the drive back is to completely power it down, tap the heels of your ruby slippers three times, then power the system back up.
   
   Note that exiting SpinRite or even rebooting the machine will NOT bring such a drive back online.
   POWER must be completely turned off.

You said: “But when I rebooted into SpinRite, it couldn't find the problem Lexar flash drive -- it's no longer showing up on its list of mass storage devices discovered.” and the fact that you said that Windows sees the flash drive afterward, make me think that you may have “rebooted into SpinRite” but may not have completely turned the power off???

There is no known way to prevent this from happening. The only thing you could do would be to note the location where the drive puts itself into Device Fault then — after a full power down and back up — restart SpinRite PAST the "sore spot" and see how it goes from there.

THANK YOU for your follow-up and report!!

Steve said:

the fact that you said that Windows sees the flash drive afterward, make me think that you may have “rebooted into SpinRite” but may not have completely turned the power off???

Click to expand...

Hi Steve,

I'veen racking my brain about this and I just can't recall what exactly I did the first time when the flash drive didn't get recognized. I seem to remember that the next time, I happened to do instead a Ctl-Alt-Del restart of the PC, and then the flash drive was found.

Next chance I get, I'll boot into SpinRite and tell it to start scanning past the current sore spot as you suggested. I'll report on developments.

In any case, there's no question but that I'll be followng @DanR's advice above, not to put anything important on that drive!

UPDATE: Since posting the above, I tried twice more (following a shutdown of the PC) to resume the level 2 scan, in each case from a spot 0.0001% past where SR reported a problem. For example, the previous error occurred at 61.0653%, so this last time I had it resume at 61.0654%.

The scan again soon failed, at 61.055%. The full message I'm getting now is:

This drive has stopped responding to commands.
Working on BIOS
drive 81h​

After an error occurred, this drive was reset to restore its normal operation. But the drive has not responded to the reset request. This indicates that the drive has entered an aberrant state which is preventing SpinRite's further work with the drive. To continue, you'll need to note the location of the trouble, reset the system, then resume SpinRite's operation at the location shown below:

Click to expand...

Ideas/suggestions are welcome.

JorgeA said:

Last night, I downloaded Spinrite 6.1 Pre-Release Candidate 5.1

Click to expand...

Okay. THAT message (the one you just quoted) is the "timeout" message, not the "Drive Fault" message. So my question is... can you watch it happen to verify that a one-minute countdown appears in the upper-left of the screen, counting down to zero, before SpinRite gives up on the drive? Since you're using Pre-Release 5.01, this SHOULD be the behavior you see, but this new code is still relatively untested.

Thanks!

Steve said:

Okay. THAT message (the one you just quoted) is the "timeout" message, not the "Drive Fault" message. So my question is... can you watch it happen to verify that a one-minute countdown appears in the upper-left of the screen, counting down to zero, before SpinRite gives up on the drive? Since you're using Pre-Release 5.01, this SHOULD be the behavior you see, but this new code is still relatively untested.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Hi Steve,

I've tried this twice more, but each time SR has stopped within ten seconds (without displaying a countdown) with the other error message:

After an error occurred, this drive was reset to restore its normal operation. But the drive has not responded to the reset request. This indicates that the drive has entered an aberrant state which is preventing SpinRite's further work with the drive. To continue, you'll need to note the location of the trouble, reset the system, then resume SpinRite's operation at the location shown below:

Click to expand...

Maybe I'll skip forward a whole percentage point or two of the drive and see if I can get that timeout mesage for you.

UPDATE: I began a level 2 scan at 70%, way past the problem areas identified above. Everything went as normal for some two hours, when my attention finally wandered -- and, in accordance with a law of nature, that's when the error was displaying on the screen when I came back to it after just a couple of minutes. I took note of the location and started a new scan (after power-cycling the PC) shortly before that spot. This time I made sure to keep looking at the screen.

I can confirm that there is NO warning visible in the top left corner of the screen (or anywhere else on it) as the moment approaches for the "aberrant state" error. You can see that the moving percentage in the lower left has stopped advancing, but there is no countdown shown. Then, after a few seconds, the red "aberrant state" screen appears.

Steve, I do see a countdown in the top left at the beginning, but it's only when SR is looking for drives to scan. It finds the internal SSD right away, then the countdown timer begins and then, as the counter nears zero, the SpinRite flash drive and the problem flash drive both finally show up in the listing.

Hope this helps.

@JorgeA :

Thanks for your testing. I'm working toward the next round of improvements. There's some chance that it will perform better. I'll post a global notice at the top of the forum pages once 5.02 is ready. Thanks again!

Hi Steve,

I downloaded both 5.03 and SRPR-EX1, not sure of which one would be more suitable to use for this flash drive. I put the latter on the SpinRite drive and ran it on the bad Lexar flash drive, letting it run from the beginning (rather than starting off somewhere in the middle).

This time, SR got to 61.0652% before stopping with the "This drive has just taken itself offline" message.

I also noticed that the countdown timer is still showing up in the upper left corner as SR is looking for drives to scan. The main difference relative to previous runs is that this time the countdown began at around 110 seconds instead of 58-60 seconds. Could have been closer to 2 minutes, but I wasn't expecting to see the timer.

Should I go ahead and try 5.03 next, or is that one superseded by EX1 ?

Thank you for your good work.

JorgeA said:

I downloaded both 5.03 and SRPR-EX1

Click to expand...

Try 5.04.exe

Mervyn Haynes said:

Try 5.04.exe

Click to expand...

Thanks, apparently that was released soon after I posted the previous message.

Downloaded it this morning and set it up on the Spinrite flash drive. Version 5.04 choked on about the same spot in the Lexar drive, at 61.0652%, with the message "This drive has just taken itself offline" followed by a paragraph that begins,

The drive is now returning "Device Fault" status.​

Click to expand...

JorgeA said:

Version 5.04 choked on about the same spot in the Lexar drive, at 61.0652%, with the message "This drive has just taken itself offline" followed by a paragraph that begins,

Click to expand...

Try 5.05!

I just tried 5.05, and it stopped in the same spot, 61.0652%.

When scanning for drives to examine, SR finds the internal SSD right away, but then takes 120 seconds to list the SpinRite flash drive and the bad Lexar flash drive. The countdown timer progresses in the top left corner while looking for the flash drives, but doesn't show up when SR reaches the problem area on the drive. I did notice that the total estimated scan time started growing quickly, from 7 hours or so to over 120 hours before the "offline/Device Fault" error message popped up. But there was no countdown shown before the Level 2 scan came to a halt.

magnificent_starfish said:

I am wondering what the desired outcome is here? It's clear the drive is terminal and nothing will fix it, SR seems to handle it gracefully, not crashing or anything.

Click to expand...

The first 61% or so of the drive seems to be OK and usable, but there also appear to be several dozen GBs of good space past the problem area(s). Is there a way to block out the problem spots, such that the rest of the flash drive (before and after the bad areas) can still be used?

JorgeA said:

The first 61% or so of the drive seems to be OK and usable, but there also appear to be several dozen GBs of good space past the problem area(s). Is there a way to block out the problem spots, such that the rest of the flash drive (before and after the bad areas) can still be used?

Click to expand...

Well . . . I suppose you could - in theory - create a partition encompassing most of the "good" area at the front of the drive (leaving some pad between that partition and the first bad area of the drive).

But . . . why bother?

This drive has already apparently experienced NAND failure in multiple areas. There is no way to know when or where the next NAND failure will occur.
However, it will occur!

I would never trust this drive for any data storage or other meaningful use.

It could however be a useful test specimen for future SpinRite 7.x development. A future SpinRite 7x may not be able to make this drive healthy/trustworthy again but it may be able to provide useful information about what is going on inside this drive.

JorgeA said:

I did notice that the total estimated scan time started growing quickly, from 7 hours or so to over 120 hours before the "offline/Device Fault" error message popped up. But there was no countdown shown before the Level 2 scan came to a halt.

Click to expand...

Hi @JorgeA:

There are two way for SpinRite to “give up” on a drive. One way is for SpinRite to try (a lot) to get a drive back online when it really doesn't want to keep going. That's the 120-second countdown you see. Since this ends SpinRite's ability to work with the drive, it will actually do two 120-second countdowns using a different "get back online" strategy the second time.

The second way for SpinRite to “give up” on a drive is for the drive to adamantly declare that it cannot proceed and to enter "Device Fault" state. Until these last few releases of SpinRite, transient "impossible" drive status was confusing SpinRite so that it might believe that a drive had declared an emergency ("Device Fault") when it really hadn't. But I believe that was finally resolved once I understood that this could happen.

So the reason you're not seeing any 120-second countdown (or two of them) is that your drive really IS entering "Device Fault" state and requiring a full power-cycle in order to force it to forget how unhappy it is.

One way you can verify this is by exiting and restarting SpinRite without powering down the machine. If SpinRite is willing to run on that drive again, after having previously declared that it's in Device Fault, then I/we still have a problem with SpinRite falsely declaring a drive emergency. But if (as I expect and hope) when rerunning, SpinRite marks the drive RED from the start and when you try to select it you learn that, yes, it's still in Device Fault, then SpinRite is doing the right thing and that drive really is "toast."

Steve said:

One way you can verify this is by exiting and restarting SpinRite without powering down the machine. If SpinRite is willing to run on that drive again, after having previously declared that it's in Device Fault, then I/we still have a problem with SpinRite falsely declaring a drive emergency. But if (as I expect and hope) when rerunning, SpinRite marks the drive RED from the start and when you try to select it you learn that, yes, it's still in Device Fault, then SpinRite is doing the right thing and that drive really is "toast."

Click to expand...

Hi Steve,

Yup, I just tried exiting and restarting SR without powering down the machine, and that's exactly what the program did: the flash drive is now shown in red.

In addition, I noticed that the 120-second countdown that was ticking during device discovery in previous rounds, did not show up this time.

The hope was that some drive-maintenance program might somehow block out the bad sectors on the drive so that an operating system could work around them, but it looks like that was not to be. To give an example from another problem drive, on one computer I had a 2TB HDD with two bad blocks out of thousands, and it was distressing to see that seemingly minimal proportion somehow working out to what Hard Disk Sentinel rates as "critical' with just 11% health.

To help a non-expert understand the situation, could we usefully draw an (admittedly gruesome) analogy to having one's jugular vein severed? After all, it's just one thin cut in one spot on the entire body, and yet...

@JorgeA:

SpinRite 7+ will definitely be obtaining file system awareness. At that point, it would be possible to have SpinRite take regions that a drive stubbornly refuses to spare out, out of service by the file system, thus potentially making the drive safe to use. The original SpinRite, starting with v1.0, had that technology for FAT file systems. I removed it from 6.1 to make room for everything new, and because support for only the FAT file system no longer made sense or was very useful.

Many people feel that drives should be either perfect or discarded. I understand and respect that position, but I don't have sufficient information to take a position either way. Perhaps once we get closer to SpinRite's next generation will have more to go on.

magnificent_starfish said:

People putting all this effort into saving a $10 USB flash drive I can not understand TBH since that thing will never be reliable.

Click to expand...

It's not merely about saving a modestly priced flash drive, it's about curiosity as to whether it could be fixed and how. Actually saving it would be icing on the cake.

Steve said:

The original SpinRite, starting with v1.0, had that technology for FAT file systems. I removed it from 6.1 to make room for everything new, and because support for only the FAT file system no longer made sense or was very useful.

Click to expand...

Ah, so THAT'S where I got the idea that maybe it could be fixed! I didn't know that this capability had fallen by the wayside.

So this leads to a new question. I'm sure I still have the first copy of SpinRite that I downloaded, way back when. If one were to reformat the flash drive as FAT (it's currently NTFS), might that earlier version of SpinRite do the trick? There is, however, the prospect of its not knowing what to do with such a large drive (128 GB).

magnificent_starfish said:

It can not be fixed. At best it can be masked or hidden or whatever you want to call it. It can be masked at firmware level or as you now propose at file system level. None of those is a fix. It's not the price I am concerned with, it's the poor quality of such devices that's reflected in the price. Again, often this type of error is indicative for the state/quality of the entire NAND chip, it's like putting a thin layer of paint over corroding metal.

Click to expand...

I understand what you're saying. I don't know what the reputation of Lexar flash drives might be, but my experience with them has been perfect, until now.

Going back to the 11% healthy HDD, can you tease out the S.M.A.R.T. data below? I'm hoping to learn something, as to me this kind of chart isn't exactly a model of clarity. To a non-expert's eyes, most of the indicators appear to point to the drive's being in good condition, and even the ones with a yellow triangle say "OK (Always passing)". So how do we get from this picture to 11% health?



Thanks in advance to you or anybody who can help to interpret this information.

magnificent_starfish said:

If you have recovered the data from the drive this seems a perfect candidate for SpinRite.

Click to expand...

Thanks very much for the information!

Yes, the data on that HDD was safely copied over to a new drive, so we're not putting anything at risk. I did try to run SpinRite on the HDD, but tbe program would scan only the first 137GB. How to get SR to scan the rest of the drive?

JorgeA said:

How to get SR to scan the rest of the drive?

Click to expand...

Until we're able to get over to SpinRite 7, the BEST THING to do, whenever possible, will be to arrange to directly attach a drive to a SATA (or IDE) adapter. That will be faster, will avoid the BIOS, and will give SpinRite the most direct access to the drive.

But, until then, Paul Farrer has developed a BIOS patch that CAN be used to remove this "yellow'ness" from SpinRite. The patching system is a bit tricky to use, but it does work and it has been proven to be safe. I don't know whether Paul has posted anything here in the web forums since this work was done in GRC's NNTP newsgroups and our GitLab.

I got a chance to install that 2TB HDD inside a PC. Here is a pair of shots from SpinRite's report:





BTW, the SR 6.1 level 2 scan went much faster than in earlier incarnations of SpinRite (although I'm sure you all knew that already!).

JorgeA said:

I got a chance to install that 2TB HDD inside a PC. Here is a pair of shots from SpinRite's report:

Click to expand...

VERY nice! And SR7 will be able to do the same through a USB connection, which will be a big bonus.

JorgeA said:

got a chance to install that 2TB HDD inside a PC. Here is a pair of shots from SpinRite's report:

Click to expand...

You might consider a Level 2 run, using DynaStat 0, starting just before the first bad block and ending just after the second bad block. DynaStat 0 will try re-writing something to the U sectors, thus typically forcing re-allocation of a non-writable U sector where a normal DynaStat run does not do a write if data is not recoverable.

However, any [potentially recoverable] data in the two U sectors would be lost. If this is not a concern then perhaps consider the suggestion above.

However, this leaves many unanswerable questions: What's next for this drive? Will one or more U's pop in the same general area at some point? Or elsewhere? And when? And if the U sectors are write-able, are they readable? And if so, for how long? This would seem to be another drive of questionable trustworthiness, suitable only as a SpinRite test specimen..

DanR said:

You might consider a Level 2 run, using DynaStat 0, starting just before the first bad block and ending just after the second bad block. DynaStat 0 will try re-writing something to the U sectors, thus typically forcing re-allocation of a non-writable U sector where a normal DynaStat run does not do a write if data is not recoverable.

However, any [potentially recoverable] data in the two U sectors would be lost. If this is not a concern then perhaps consider the suggestion above.

However, this leaves many unanswerable questions: What's next for this drive? Will one or more U's pop in the same general area at some point? Or elsewhere? And when? And if the U sectors are write-able, are they readable? And if so, for how long? This would seem to be another drive of questionable trustworthiness, suitable only as a SpinRite test specimen..

Click to expand...

I went back to rescan the drive, starting with the "U" sectors, but none were found this time. I didn't adjust the DynaStat setting, didn't see a way to do it. May have to break down and RTFM to find out. (OK, I just found the instructions in the SR FAQ section. Good to know.)

Thinking that maybe I had input the wrong block locations, I ran a new level 2 scan of the whole drive to pinpoint the problem areas -- and again, no unrecoverable sectors were identified. The "ECC recovered" item on the S.M.A.R.T. screen now shows all the squares in white, with the current/max values at 114/114 (previously, 96/114).

I will have Hard Disk Sentinel and other utilities check this 2TB HDD drive and see what they have to say about it.

As you said, we can't be sure that the problem is permanently fixed. But I'm impressed anyway!

JorgeA said:

As you said, we can't be sure that the problem is permanently fixed. But I'm impressed anyway

Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing your exploration. And this is almost always people's experience with SpinRite, which is why it remains a viable utility even after 35 years. And there's a LOT more in store in the immediate future.

Update on that 2TB HDD:

After the SpinRite level 2 scan, Hard Disk Sentinel did not find any bad sectors, and it now assesses the drive's health at 22% (up from 11% before the SR scan). FWIW.

The HDD passed every available test in Seagate SeaTools for Windows.

Currently running an Error Scan in HD Tune 2.55.

fzabkar said:

I recommend Victoria for Windows to perform an error scan. Victoria will identify any "slow" sectors. HDDScan is another such tool. MHDD is a better tool, but it runs under DOS, and you may need to select IDE mode in BIOS.

Click to expand...

I'd never heard of that program, but last night I downloaded it and let it run overnight. Below is a screenshot. What do you all think?

fzabkar said:

It looks like the drive is in excellent health. When a drive starts failing, you'll see lots of 1.0 and 3.0 second blocks. Yours has none.

Click to expand...

Huh, how about that. This is the same drive that Hard Disk Sentinel had said was at 11% health and then at 22% after the SpinRite level 2 scan.

So I can think of three different explanations:

1. Victoria is wrong and the HDD is dying;
2. Hard Disk Sentinel is wrong and the HDD is fine;
3. SpinRite improved the HDD to the point where it either looks or actually is in good shape.

Any other possibilities?

magnificent_starfish said:

You should start treat these tools for what they are, they can only report what they 'see'. And you take that information and decide if you're still happy using that drive.

Click to expand...

I work in publishing and not in any tech-related field, so drive health is far from being an area of expertise for me. When different drive health/maintenance utilities give me assessments that appear to run against one another, I'm not really in a position to know which assessment is more reliable.

I came to this forum with one or two problem drives (a flash drive and a HDD), hoping to learn what the nature of their problems might be and whether these problems could be fixed, and if so, whether the fix was worth the effort. Most of that has been achieved. The flash drive decision now seems pretty clear-cut, not so much for the HDD although I have learned a lot even there.

That HDD had been slated for junking, or maybe recycling after suitable wiping. Although it doesn't seem prudent to ever rely on it again as primary storage, maybe it can still serve as tertiary storage (a "backup of a backup") where its ongoing health status can be monitored.

One thing that I'm delighted about is seeing how fast the new SpinRite is. Formerly, I'd hesitated to run SR on these large drives because my previous experience with them suggested that a level 2 scan would take days or weeks to finish: imagine my surprise when this one was done in under 5 hours! Although to be honest, I'm not sure if this is because modern drive interfaces are faster, or because SR itself is faster, or maybe both factors contribute to the speed improvement.

JorgeA said:

One thing that I'm delighted about is seeing how fast the new SpinRite is. Formerly, I'd hesitated to run SR on these large drives because my previous experience with them suggested that a level 2 scan would take days or weeks to finish: imagine my surprise when this one was done in under 5 hours! Although to be honest, I'm not sure if this is because modern drive interfaces are faster, or because SR itself is faster, or maybe both factors contribute to the speed improvement.

Click to expand...

SpinRite 6.0 is constrained to do all that it does by working through the BIOS. Thus, SR 6.0 is limited to s-l-o-w BIOS I/O speed.

SpinRite 6.1, OTOH, uses native drivers for accessing internal drives (NO BIOS involved!). Hence SR 6.1 can take advantage of all of the speed that modern drive-and-controller combos can provide.

Adding to what Dan wrote, one of the biggest accelerators aside from side stepping the BIOS is that SpinRite is able to work with far larger data transfer buffers. All use of the BIOS is strictly limited to 127 sectors, maximum. SpinRite's levels 3 through 5 transfer 32,768 sectors at once (16 megabytes) which can make a huge difference. SpinRite and its new native drivers are quick enough that levels 1 and 2 use 1,024 sector transfers since we don't miss any "revs" by issuing smaller requests. But the BIOS is limited to much smaller transfers since they need to fit within a 64K real mode "segment".

@DanR and @Steve, thanks very much for the details. I now understand the improvements in SpinRite much, much better!

And thanks to everyone else who pitched in with their analysis and suggestions.

magnificent_starfish said:

Assumption for example being you're going to ask for some sectors on same track. It works well I suppose if everything 'aligns'.

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Well I don't know that assumptions are good for predictions on "random reads", but if the SPINNING device has enough RAM to read the entire track of the disk into RAM, and using that RAM won't otherwise cause problems for the device (i.e. it's not RAM limited to the extent it needs to discard something more important) then it does at least seem logical to me for it to always read the entire track into RAM because it's already sitting there spinning under the heads.

fzabkar said:

2TB in 5 hours works out at 111 MB/s. That would be a normal average transfer rate. Victoria's average speed was 149 MB/s, and the scan duration was 3 hours 24 minutes. Therefore, BIOS isn't the limiting factor here.

The total scan time depends on the health of the drive. A drive with a weak head may require a whole week. What you should do now is to repeat the scan with SpinRite to see how it compares with Victoria now that the drive has been "refreshed".

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As you asked, here's a new SR scan of the drive:

Steve said:

Until we're able to get over to SpinRite 7, the BEST THING to do, whenever possible, will be to arrange to directly attach a drive to a SATA (or IDE) adapter. That will be faster, will avoid the BIOS, and will give SpinRite the most direct access to the drive.

But, until then, Paul Farrer has developed a BIOS patch that CAN be used to remove this "yellow'ness" from SpinRite. The patching system is a bit tricky to use, but it does work and it has been proven to be safe. I don't know whether Paul has posted anything here in the web forums since this work was done in GRC's NNTP newsgroups and our GitLab.

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Hi Steve,

I have quite a number of spinning drives that I am trying to make 'useful' again 6.1 RC (I am a spinning drive hoarder) and quite a number are giving me the "Device Taken Offline" error when connected via USB (with exact fault location) So no data to recover, these are spare drives that I can afford to throw away (crying uncontrollably) is it worth trying a SATA/IDE adapter in this case JUST in case they are usable, or bite the bullet and trash can away (crying again).

My disposal method is: full format drive (not quick) then put under a pillar drill and drill 6 holes completely though the whole drive, then heat until red with a blowtorch ... then trashcan

Thanks for 6.1 keep up the great work ...

JackOuzzi said:

is it worth trying a SATA/IDE adapter

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Yes. SATA and IDE will always be better than USB in SpinRite 6.1. They will hopefully be equal in 7.0.

ColbyBouma said:

Yes. SATA and IDE will always be better than USB in SpinRite 6.1. They will hopefully be equal in 7.0.

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Many thanks, just remembered an old 4 bay NAS in my "hoard", just booted 6.1 from usb with one of the "error" drives inside, running great at the moment .... I will now use that as a "Spinrite" drive tester