April/May NewsLetter - Tiger's Evaluation of SpinRite

Sean's Evaluation of SpinRite

I recently had the opportunity to test SpinRite from Gibson Research Corporation. I had heard nothing but good things about SpinRite and was anxious to test it out.

SpinRite performs basically the same functions as Scandisk. It scans your hard drive looking for bad sectors,and if it finds any it will try to recover the data. As you know, bad sectors may be caused by many different things, but are generally a sign of a failing hard drive.

You begin to see the difference between the programs in how they find bad sectors. Scan disk simply attempts to reads the information on the hard drive and if it can’t read the information, the sector is declared bad and there goes your information. SpinRite claims that Scandisk is the number one cause of lost data. Spin Rite on the other hand, will move your information in the sector it’s reading and then read and write to that sector and stress test it. This is a much more thorough test and will find bad sectors on your hard drive much quicker than Scandisk.

There are many other differences that make SpinRite much more appealing compared to Scandisk. This includes its use in data recovery when your hard drive crashes and hard drive benchmarking tools.

Installation is a snap, the zip file you download is tiny and so is the program. The program is written in assembly language, which makes it extremely small and fast. You can choose to make a boot disk and run SpinRite from there or run it in windows, which will automatically shutdown and load into DOS.

The scanning process may take a long time, I ran mine on a PII 350, with 8.4 gig hard drive and it took just over eight hours. A great feature is the option to exit SpinRite and when you run it again, it detects that you didn’t finish your last session and gives you the option to start from where you left off or begin again.

I am happy to report that after running test, SpinRite found no bad sectors on my drive. SpinRite has officially been added to my computer maintenance suite of software.

Although SpinRite’s features may seem more geared towards the professional user, its usefulness is applicable to anyone. I’m sure that many of us would love to have software that could save us the cost of replacing a hard drive or the cost of professional data recovery. If you’ve ever known the pain of a hard drive failure, SpinRite is for you.

- Sean Lynch (Saskatoon)

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