[ale] what exactly does a long smart hdd test do?

Sun May 13 10:41:41 EDT 2012

90+ % of the people that respond to such topics on large general forums haven't used the product, don't know the inventor, and don't know beans about what they're talking about. The signal to noise ratio is usually quite low. I put little credence in those sources. I have personal eyewitness experience that says the product has worked for me and I've successfully recovered data a couple of times from failing hard drives with it.

The "experts" were claiming that the Wright brothers couldn't possibly fly a heavier than air vehicle for about 5 years after they demonstrated manned flight, so I've read. Show me a real expert, who has used SpinRite and similar products, to maintain real hard drives, over a long period of time; then I start paying more attention. Mike W, for example, has demonstrated expertise, so I'm more willing to listen to his opinion.

I know that SpinRite is the first thing I'm going to grab if Windows or Linux starts throwing errors and cannot boot or read parts of the hard drive. I've seen it work, so I'm trusting it until I find something better. I'm also going to be looking more in depth into dd-rescue, now that it's been brought to my attention.

Sincerely,

Ron

--

Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and K-9 Mail.
Please excuse my potential brevity.

(To whom it may concern. My email address has changed. Replying to former
messages prior to 03/31/12 with my personal address will go to the wrong
address. Please send all personal correspondence to the new address.)

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone. I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such. I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O) Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com

Justin Goldberg <justgold79 at gmail.com> wrote:

SpinRite is universally slammed in comp.ibm.pc.hardware.storage in
every thread since r6.0 came out - around 2004.

On 5/12/12, Ron Frazier (ALE) <atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> "Michael H. Warfield" <mhw at wittsend.com> wrote:
>
>>Oh, LORD, I told myself I was not going to get sucked into another
>>Steve
>>Gibson cesspool religious discussion, yet here I am...
>>
>
>>
>>My personal opinion from both the disk storage angle and the security
>>angle is that Steve Gibson is now little more than snake-oil surviving
>>on past glories.
>
> Hi Mike W.,
>
> I appreciate the technical information you've shared. I truly don't mean
> any offence by the following statement and hope you don't take it that way,
> but, based on the quotes above, I have to ask myself if you're being totally
> objective, as those quotes sound like a definite negative bias.
>
> In particular, snake-oil implies to me that Mr. Gibson is engaged in
> deception, fraud, or deceit; and, I really don't think that is the case. I
> trust that he's looking out for the best interests of his listeners. I have
> no qualms about the $ 89 I paid him once upon a time years ago for SpinRite.
> I think it's been worth every penny. I will admit that there are now
> cheaper alternatives that do most of what SpinRite does.
>
> Yon mention 3 things which SpinRite mainly does which I would agree to.
>
> 1) Deal with data fading. This could also be called grown defects or bit
> rot. I think we can certainly say that no magnetic surface is perfect, and
> that some sectors or parts of sectors will be magnetically weak. Hopefully,
> the controller will catch those and avoid using them. The real question is,
> will the weak ones that the controller didn't catch get weaker over time,
> and will data that was once stored become inaccessible after being ignored
> and not accessed for a long time. You say it's not relevant to modern
> drives. I'm not totally convinced, but I need to do some homework to
> discuss it much further.
>
> 2) Data recovery of bad sectors / blocks. This can obviously be relevant,
> as drives do fail for any number of non mechanical reasons. By definition,
> we're talking about sectors that cannot be read by the normal procedures
> that the OS uses. So, right off the bat, unless you do something radical,
> you're going to lose all 1024, 2048, 4096 or whatever bytes are in the
> sector. You say other things do this better. I'm definitely not convinced
> of that. However, I'm going to have to study dd-rescue a bit to discuss
> that.
>
> 3) Drive head / servo calibration. I really wasn't aware of this one. But,
> based on what you said, I'll concede that this is probably not relevant to
> modern drives.
>
> I want to study the technical data you shared and hopefully generate an
> intelligent reply. I will admit to being a fan of Mr. Gibson, but I don't
> think I'm a "fanboy". I have benefitted greatly both from his security
> podcast and from the SpinRite product. My pc is both more secure and more
> reliable based on my listening to the information he shares. Having said
> that, I certainly don't want to be doing 36 hours of exhaustive diagnostics
> on my hard drives if it's not helpful. I'm not totally convinced that that
> is the case however.
>
> I'll also ask myself if I'm being objective when I reply, and keep religion
> to a minimum. My only goal is to facilitate maximum reliability of my
> machines, and those of other people whom I'm in contact with.
>
> I'll write some more later after I've studied your information a bit more.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ron
>
>
> --
>
> Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and K-9 Mail.
> Please excuse my potential brevity.
>
> (To whom it may concern. My email address has changed. Replying to former
> messages prior to 03/31/12 with my personal address will go to the wrong
> address. Please send all personal correspondence to the new address.)
>
> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
> call on the phone. I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
> mailing lists and such. I don't always see new email messages very
> quickly.)
>
> Ron Frazier
> 770-205-9422 (O) Leave a message.
> linuxdude AT techstarship.com
>
>
>_____________________________________________

> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>

-- 

Justin Goldberg

*justgold79 at gmail.com*
(504) 208-1158
http://gplus.to/goldberg
http://twitter.com/justingoldberg
_____________________________________________

Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20120513/09d117c1/attachment.html 