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While I understand some of the vibes the author picks up (can one guy who writes all his programs in assembler really have the answers to hard drive maintenance

While I understand some of the vibes the author picks up (can one guy who writes all his programs in assembler really have the answers to hard drive maintenance and recovery?), the article does not seem to go much beyond this vibe and speculation based reasoning. It would be more convincing if there were experiments testing the claimed benefits of using SpinRite, specifically around performance improvements caused by running a scan. Personally I think the claimed data recovery capabilities of SpinRite are less relevant these days due to file systems like ZFS that have scrubbing and data recovery built in. Distributed block and blob storage systems that clouds are built on have similar systems as well. I'd like to recommend Security Now, the podcast the the author of SpinRite, Steve Gibson, hosts. While at times Steve has a non-consensus take on things (other commenters have noted his preference for out-of-support versions of Windows), he is pretty good at explaining the technical details about the topics he covers. It's a good way to keep up with security news. Probably only the Security, Cryptography, Whatever podcast is better (more in-depth discussions of low level topics with experts), but it less consistently published.

KennyBlanken 2y ago
[flagged]
- MarkSweep 2y ago
  > The fact that you don't understand the difference between what amounts to a very dressed-up bad-block scan and ZFS scrubbing shows how under-qualified you are to be forming opinions on these subjects. I thought I was pretty clear that I thought SpinRite was no longer relevant because of better file systems being available. Perhaps I should have elaborated in my comment that specifically the checksumming and redundancy provided by ZFS (and other filesystems) are what makes it scrubbing able to recover corrupted data. Data corruption that obviously SpinRite would be blind to.
- zbentley 2y ago
  Could you edit your comment and remove the last paragraph? It’s interesting info until you veer into personal insults, which doesn’t help you inform others.
- toast0 2y ago
  > ZFS scrubbing is designed to counter issues that crop up with bit flips caused by extremely unlikely hardware errors and things like cosmic rays - which are extremely rare, but when you have petabyte scale storage, they actually become plausible risks. Scrubbing has multiple purposes. Sure cosmic rays, but it also helps detect poor cabling (if somehow that didn't throw checksum errors in regular use), wild writes and degrading media. Reading every sector with filesystem data is similar to a function of SpinRite that seems to read all sectors. Of course, SpinRite won't know if a good read holds bad data. But ZFS scrub doesn't read all sectors. According to claims, it sounds like SpinRite could issue uncorrected reads to a weak sector multiple times, run statistics and guess at the right value and write it back? That seems possibly useful, especially if the drive is likely to reallocate the sector when it's written to. Issuing writes to all sectors of a spinning disk can help the drive firmware with reallocating problematic sectors, although there's free tools to do that.
- asveikau 2y ago
  > ZFS scrubbing is designed to counter issues that crop up with bit flips caused by extremely unlikely hardware errors and things like cosmic rays - which are extremely rare, but when you have petabyte scale storage, they actually become plausible risks. It's not rare at all and you don't need petabytes to hit it in your home. I also doubt it's caused by cosmic rays. People seem to have this view that hardware is rock solid all the time. It isn't. Components fail.
- ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
  >Which is odd given you often listen to his podcast - how curious that you're not an expert /s Be nice.

KennyBlanken 2y ago

[flagged]

MarkSweep 2y ago
> The fact that you don't understand the difference between what amounts to a very dressed-up bad-block scan and ZFS scrubbing shows how under-qualified you are to be forming opinions on these subjects. I thought I was pretty clear that I thought SpinRite was no longer relevant because of better file systems being available. Perhaps I should have elaborated in my comment that specifically the checksumming and redundancy provided by ZFS (and other filesystems) are what makes it scrubbing able to recover corrupted data. Data corruption that obviously SpinRite would be blind to.
zbentley 2y ago
Could you edit your comment and remove the last paragraph? It’s interesting info until you veer into personal insults, which doesn’t help you inform others.
toast0 2y ago
> ZFS scrubbing is designed to counter issues that crop up with bit flips caused by extremely unlikely hardware errors and things like cosmic rays - which are extremely rare, but when you have petabyte scale storage, they actually become plausible risks. Scrubbing has multiple purposes. Sure cosmic rays, but it also helps detect poor cabling (if somehow that didn't throw checksum errors in regular use), wild writes and degrading media. Reading every sector with filesystem data is similar to a function of SpinRite that seems to read all sectors. Of course, SpinRite won't know if a good read holds bad data. But ZFS scrub doesn't read all sectors. According to claims, it sounds like SpinRite could issue uncorrected reads to a weak sector multiple times, run statistics and guess at the right value and write it back? That seems possibly useful, especially if the drive is likely to reallocate the sector when it's written to. Issuing writes to all sectors of a spinning disk can help the drive firmware with reallocating problematic sectors, although there's free tools to do that.
asveikau 2y ago
> ZFS scrubbing is designed to counter issues that crop up with bit flips caused by extremely unlikely hardware errors and things like cosmic rays - which are extremely rare, but when you have petabyte scale storage, they actually become plausible risks. It's not rare at all and you don't need petabytes to hit it in your home. I also doubt it's caused by cosmic rays. People seem to have this view that hardware is rock solid all the time. It isn't. Components fail.
ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
>Which is odd given you often listen to his podcast - how curious that you're not an expert /s Be nice.