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I Spinrite (level 4) my main workstation's spinning hard drives to "exercise" them and re-enforce the recorded bits.

Lately, at Steve Gibson's recommendation, I've also been running Spinrite on level 2 on my SSD drives (you NEVER want to run a level 4 on an SSD as this re-writes every sector and will wear out the drive).

Subjectively, I have seen improvement in performance in older SSDs that were starting to develop weak memory cells that the internal error correction hadn't dealt with.

However, today I got a really nice example of SSD resurrection by Spinrite. A client gave me a year old Dell XPS 17 with an SSD boot drive that took 7+ minutes to boot, and when it finally did boot ran horribly slow. I ran a Spinrite level 2 scan on it and it detected 20+ unrecoverable bad sectors. After running the scan the drive booted instantly into Windows. I have since run the scan again twice. The second time it picked up 2 more bad sectors. The last time it didn't find any.

Basically by running a level 2 scan on an SSD (which is a read-only scan unless it finds a bad sector, and thus does not wear out the SSD like a level 4 would), you are forcing the SSD's controller to recognize and deal with bad/weak memory cells.

Is Steve coming out with a new version of SpinRite? Version 6 is pretty old by today's standards.

FP...did you check the drive's SMART to see how much use it has already had? i'm curious to hear how much it had already been used before starting to wear out.

EXEC: He has stated on the podcast that he'll be releasing 6.1 when he has a chance to work on it. That's mostly to deal with modern SATA controllers that sometimes can't see a drive from DOS.

B-MAN1: This machine has seen very little use. It's a Dell XPS 17 the client bought almost 2 years ago, used it a couple of months, and then it got put away. It's an early gen SSD - a Samsung PM810 but OEM from Dell. Samsung won't support it, and their firmware updates won't work on it, meanwhile Dell never released a firmware update.

I suspect the drive is a lemon, or else it has deteriorated somehow over 2 years from lack of use, which I didn't think was possible.

No SMART data. Like a lot of early gen SSDs, it supports Smart but only for temperature. It doesn't show any other data.

Even though Spinrite "revived it" which allowed me to clone it, the drive still keeps coming up with 1 or 2 bad sectors every time I scan it with Spinrite Level 2 (I've been hoping that it will eventually stabilize, but no joy). I've also scanned it on another PC to make sure it's not the laptop's controller.

It boots fine and is running fast, but I wouldn't trust it so I'm going to give him the option of replacing it with another SSD or a spindle drive.

From a transcript of Security Now 344 concerning the next release of Spinrite:

First of all, all SpinRite 6 owners are going to get 6.1 for free whenever I get around to doing it. There aren't any bugs that I know if in SpinRite. I just want to catch it up with things that have happened since I finished it in 2004.

And there's been a lot of changes since then, much stronger use of SATA, serial ATA, over parallel ATA. Much larger drives. BIOSes are becoming increasingly buggy, so SpinRite's dependence on the BIOS is some thing I want to remove. I want to build in Ultra DMA. We got that Western Digital hybrid drive that uses some flash and some storage. SpinRite already does the right thing, but it could do a better job with it. We've got the big sector drives, or maybe it's the WD big sector drives that use 4K sectors. Again, SpinRite works with those, but I could detect that and do a better job in terms of buffer sizing and to make it better.

So I'm going to update SpinRite. But waiting to purchase it makes no sense because it works fine now. I'm just going to make it work better.

Okay, the laptop is still under warranty, and the Dell diagnostic failed the drive and gave me an error code. It's still a pleasure dealing with Dell tech support via online chat. It took 15 minutes to arrange an advance RMA with 2 day shipping. They offered to send a tech to replace the drive, but it's a hassle scheduling around that (not to mention sometimes those techs are idiots).

I researched the drive and the model is a the same one used in Apple laptops. They don't have a history of any major problems, so maybe it was a bad drive for day one and he just didn't use the laptop long enough for the problems to show up.

At the very least a replacement drive should have newer firmware and - who knows - since it's a 2 year old drive maybe they'll send a more modern model.

that's good news about the warranty replacement. always nice to hear success stories. good info on spinrite as well. i've used it several times, but nothing recently. no proactive use by me, but i probably should...

Steve Gibson read my letter about this drive on his Security Now podcast this week:

Episode #406 and he reads it around the 44:00 minute mark: http://twit.tv/show/security-now/406