SpinRite

SpinRite is a piece of data recovery software written by Steve Gibson of dubious Security Now fame. Anyone familiar with the matter knows how much Gibson likes to boast about SpinRite, how it is a complicated piece of software writted in pure Assembly language, how it’s polished and thoroughly tested on a variety of obscure hardware to achieve perfection at every release, and how its data-recovery algorithms are based on intricate physics of modern disks to ensure the recovery of every bit of data that could possibly be recovered. The data recovery ability “which far exceeds any other known utility” is the main selling pitch there.

How close is this pitch to reality? The internet seems to be divided about this. In every data-recovery forum and subreddit discussion I’ve read, there are people who swear by SpitRite, as well as people who argue it is nothing but snake oil. And seeing as how failing disks fail differently, progressively, and, in most cases, unpredictably, a proper study is very hard to design, so all we have is personal experiences and anecdotal evidences.

Well, now I have some, too. I happen to own a copy of SpinRite, and I had a disk failure recently, so I can add my own experience to the discussion.

Some time ago, an old laptop that I use for my Nextcloud server and the Subsonic server for my music collection got overheated badly, and its disk started acting up. I wanted to replace it with an SSD anyway, and I do have backups, so it wasn’t really a hair-pulling issue. However, before resorting to restoring from backups, I first decided to give SpinRite a go.

SpinRite spent quite some time gnawing at the ancient 1 Tb Samsung Momentus only to eventually declare that of the two problematic areas on this disk, both were absolutely and totally unrepairable, and no data could be recovered from the affected sectors. Still, I didn’t feel like setting up the partitions and all that from scratch, so I fired up ddrescue to copy the whole disk to SSD, planning to recover from backups what couldn’t be copied from the failing disk. ddrescue did have issues with two areas of the drive, but those were easily scraped on the second pass.

Yes, where the famed SpinRite failed miserably and pronounced the data irrevocable, good old ddrescue was able to recover every bit! Two for the ubiquitous open-source tool, zero for the $89 snake oil “performing miracles of data recovery” with its “legendary DynaStat data recovery system”. There you go.

To be fair, this is not the first time Steve Gibson’s claims prove to be bullshit.