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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

The author of this piece seems to think highly of his abilities but by his own admission doesn’t understand how spinrite works. Information that’s not that hard to come by or imagine.

On SN, Gibson explains for SSDs that SR rewrites marginal cells to avoid subsequent error correction delays, speeding things up.

Notice the author doesn’t say, I tried it on ten dead drives heading for the garbage heap and it did nothing… no, he says basically I don’t think it could work. Unless you actually wrote similar code you’d have no idea. Did this person even attempt to develop a low level disk tool of any capacity, much less one of production quality?

Also complains about the website and SG being old-fashioned—well let’s see your website when you’re 70? and had decades of career behind you. I still prefer vintage to a react/electron monstrosity.

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>Gibson explains for SSDs that SR rewrites marginal cells

Gibson knows this is a lie, but he keeps repeating this. You cant target particular flash cell on SSD, its impossible. There is FTL between you and raw flash.

What you can do is force SSD to reinitialize whole flash with ATA Secure Erase or NVMe Secure Erase. You dont need to spend $80 on snake oil software pretending to do something else to do Secure Erase.

I used that word because they aren’t actually sectors, but it’s immaterial if it is a cell or the enclosing sector. They can be overwritten as a full block of course.

Whether this actually resets the voltages might vary by drive, who knows—would need to see hard data to properly verify. Without that data, both Gibson and critics are talking out their asses.

Gibson is a known quantity and more reliable than internet nobodies however. It sounds feasible and I (so far) have no tangible reason to disbelieve him. If you want to prove him wrong, do the work.

>They can be overwritten as a full block of course.

No. Nothing other than drive firmware has any control over which physical flash area your transfer will land at.

Doesn’t need. Such a tool only need keep reading until data is retrieved, then write it again. It should be full speed again on the next read.

And this is exactly how SG describes it.

So we went from "SpinRite rewrites marginal cells" to "reads all the data on SSD hoping SSD firmware to magically fix itself"? aka $80 for dd if=/dev/nvmexxx of=/dev/null

You've now veered into the territory of the other posters which I already addressed.

No one (sane) calls Dropbox a fraud because rsync exists, or Adobe because Gimp exists. Or that McDonalds is a fraud when wild Ungulates and arrows/knives exist. These products simply target groups who desire convenience.

If you think normal folks are comfortable with the CLI, much less dd (probably the most dangerous command), you are decidedly out-of-touch. Restoring access/speed to important data conveniently via menu/progress-bar is often worth 10x that price. I've seen people buy brand-new several thousand-dollar computers to fix such problems. e.g. We were given a free iMac because the owner didn't know how to buy/install memory.

I like how you're providing the knee-jerk haters with rational push-back, using facts, logic, and also quite an eloquent language. I strive to do the same when I can. I think this is important in discussions on many topics, including political ones, because people online (but also IRL) are too prone to adopt some hateful stance towards someone to get the dopamine hit, without giving them the benefit of doubt and rational equitable analysis.

Thanks, I do have a bad day once in a while, though have been doing this particular kind of discussion since the slashdot days. So it doesn't tend to rile me up.

It’s 2024. You can’t develop a low-level disk tool, because there is no such thing as a low-level disk interface anymore. Using the rawest available interface, your tool will be several levels of abstraction away from the level Spinrite claims to operate at. It’s like saying you’re going to get AWS S3 to rewrite an object by accessing it through the HTTP API. I mean, sure, maybe, but any copy will do that just as well.

It may “work”, but the question is whether it works better than simple ddrescue.

And DropBox is not needed either when rsync exists, right?

Reality is that many fewer people know Linux than Windows tools. Lots of proprietary software is used when floss would do.

SpinRite is not a windows tool.

Windows ancestor, the DOS TUI.

That's not easier than a linux boot disk.

Doesn’t matter, people are familiar with what they are familiar with. And that is still M$ Windows, to a huge degree.

Just had a client who only allowed MS App 2FA email for “security reasons.” Meaning the IT head couldn’t be bothered to understand anything else. Even better, free, open standards like TOTP or FIDO2.

Can you say explicitly here what exactly does Mr. Gibson or Spinrite software claim about the level Spinrite operates at? Because I've heared him say Spinrite uses either the slow BIOS interface, or his own (IDE,AHCI?) drivers. These modes of operating the disk are, as far as I know, quite possible. Operating systems use them as well.

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