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Steve Gibson Read My Spinrite Question on Security Now
Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2012 1:03 pm
by FlyingPenguin
Heh. I've emailed him a few questions, but I never thought it would get read on the show.
It's around 31:30
http://twit.tv/show/security-now/373
Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2012 1:07 pm
by DaMaN
sweet, that must have been thrilling for you.
Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2012 2:55 pm
by NubyCanuby_OFC
He says "and Robert is exactly right" around 34:55. Now you have proof from the creator of SpinRite that your theory is correct.
Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2012 11:47 am
by b-man1
nice!...and good stuff to know. thanks.
Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2012 3:35 pm
by darcy
neat-o!
mile
Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2012 5:50 pm
by FlyingPenguin
Yeah, he has subsequently cleared that up since I sent him that email several months ago. Level 2 won't hurt an SSD, since it only writes if an unrecoverable sector is found, but the method Spinrite uses to recover a sector doesn't really work on an SSD anyway so a Level 1 scan is the best choice for an SSD. It just forces the SSD's internal error correction to asses every sector and if it sees one that's borderline, it will swap it out.
The advanced recovery tricks Spinrite uses in Level 2 & 4 are specifically designed for spinning drives. They force the heads to approach the bad sector from different angles and at different accelerations (actually it tries this 2000 different times) in the hope that it may get lucky and read that bad sector just one more time and recover it, or most of it. That's why it can take so long to repair a drive in really bad condition. I've had some customer's drives scanning for WEEKS.
The good news is that Steve is releasing a long awaited upgrade to Spinrite that will work better with non-standard SATA controllers, natively support faster drive speeds, and tweak a few other things.