Comment by morninglight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morninglight | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Amazon's problems with fraudulent memory products were well documented in 2023 when GRC published their test results for a dozen such drives purchased from the site. In response, GRC developed a free program, called "ValiDrive", to scan and test drives for this growing problem.

ValiDrive performs a quick, random-sequence spot-check across the drive's entire declared storage space. At every location it verifies the successful storage and retrieval of random (unspoofable) test data.

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

The program has been extensively tested, is freely downloadable and comes from a well respected site with a long history in the security business. Steve Gibson announced this development in 2023 and it has been downloaded over 600,000 times.

https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm

In addition to this effort, Steve has been creating an in-depth weekly podcast called "Security Now" for over 20 years. An archive of all 1039 podcasts and transcripts can be found online where they are freely downloadable.

https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm

ValiDrive is Windows-only and closed source. Does it have any advantages over https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3 ?

ValiDrive was designed to be fast and nondestructive -

In a random, non-repeating sequence, at each of 576 separate evenly spread locations on any drive, ValiDrive reads the current contents of that region. It then fills that region with random “data noise” then reads back the region's contents to verify that the “data noise” was actually stored. ValiDrive then always rewrites the region's original data to restore whatever data may have been originally stored there.

For in-depth analysis, Gibson's "SpinRite" can be used -

The two programs are complimentary but very different. ValiDrive quickly checks for the presence of any storage at 576 locations across a drive's storage media. SpinRite thoroughly, deeply and fully examines, verifies, and exercises any drive's storage media, while also performing comprehensive data recovery if necessary.

So, ValiDrive is a “quickie” test to see whether any storage is present, whereas SpinRite is the heavy hitter that verifies every byte of a drive's storage to verify its integrity and reliability.

SpinRite is a data professional's tool at a hobbyist price - inexpensive, but not free.

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Validrive is less than 100K bytes! You could download and test it in 10 minutes. That should answer any questions you may have.

But it's also windows only...

Yeah, though for non-windows (assuming you don’t mind nuking any disk contents), various permutations of dd, md5sum, and pipes work pretty well.

Windows is….. significantly more challenging.

SpinRite is not a Windows application. Or were you talking about ValiDrive?

Spinrite is for HDDs, sure you can use it on SSDs but that's fairly useless in the best case and actively destructive in the worst case. The whole point of Spinrite is exploiting the magnetic nature of HDDs for recovery, that's the only thing that distinguishes it from other generic block device analysis and data recovery software. For SSDs there are plenty of open source software that will work just as well for reading raw data (but what you get for unallocated blocks is at the whim of proprietary SSD controllers anyway).

Spinrite had utility for combating data loss inherent to the HDD medium... I don't like the idea of ValidDrive because it's a paid user tool to fight fraud, that's a bad incentive, you don't want to benefit from that, it should be free and open.

> In a random, non-repeating sequence, at each of 576 separate evenly spread locations on any drive, ValiDrive reads the current contents of that region. It then fills that region with random “data noise” then reads back the region's contents to verify that the “data noise” was actually stored. ValiDrive then always rewrites the region's original data to restore whatever data may have been originally stored there.

Does this test actually spot modern fakes? My understanding was that they typically used simple modulo addressing such that any write was immediately readable, and even large continuous chunks operated perfectly fine, it just also "overwrote" that address every 4GB or whatever.

How is a "write random data and undo it later" test considered "nondestructive"? Unless it has fs knowledge and only does it to unallocated sectors.

One advantage - it's much easier to get up and running. If you are on Windows, you can probably download it and be running it in less time than it's going to take to download the source code for f3.

`nix-shell -p f3` took about 1 second to run on my machine. I didn't even have to install Windows or sign up for an online account.

Installing and learning to use NixOS probably takes a layman longer than ordering a laptop from amazon, receiving it, realizing something's wrong with it, returning it, getting a replacement that works, then downloading and running this tool on an ssd they already own.

I know Steve Gibson as the author of "Trouble in Paradise", a tool for validating and testing zip disks and drives back in the day. He even aired on one of G4 TV's tech channels once. This guy knows and loves testing storage.

Steve Gibson? Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time… Maybe 30 years? SpinRite?

Steve “RAW sockets Will Destroy the Internet” Gibson

Steve Gibson also does a show called Security Now with Leo. One of the best IT security podcasts out here. He knows so much about IT and IT security it is amazing.

https://twit.tv/shows/security-now

Long Live Steve Gibson

Excellent! I wanted to check a new SD card I bought from Amazon. It's pretty much the best as card available for use with a steam deck, yet often it needs to be reinserted which is making me suspicious

Reply on news.ycombinator.com