effie

What is an "HDD de-cluster algo"?

Observations of Gibson's style are all negative, except at the very end, praising the user interface. But that last element read more like a quick self-cleaning ritual for the author of the piece, rather than effort to provide a balanced description.

Gibson's style may very well be overly self-congratulary and deserving criticism, and many could agree on that. But this piece still reads like inordinate amount of effort just to show somebody and their work in negative light, without actually checking their product and evaluating it rationally and equitably. Even if there are bad things to say about Mr. Gibson's style or his software, the software may still be working and useful, and no attempt at serious evaluation was made.

> And I think it's fair to ask someone who is selling a piece of software for $89 to provide some backing for their claims beyond ones that would only pertain to largely-obsolete hardware.

I agree it is fair to ask, and Mr. Gibson seems like a reasonable ,easy to talk person. Did you try? He has a podcast, Twitter and a newsgroup discussion forum.

It is not the same app, he had a release 6.0 and 6.1 recently, and he deals with SSDs now.

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.

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.

Did your disk get worse as a result of running Spinrite? My understanding is that the author and many people suggest using it to get the problematic drive work better, and be able to read data it couldn't read before. According to testimonials online, this sometimes does succeed. Of course, it can also cause the drive to get worse or fail completely. But we don't have statistics data to determine which outcome is more probable, so it would be unfair to denounce the advice or the author (as some people do) just because the advice didn't work to user's satisfaction in their particular case. I agree that Spinrite or any such program should, as the first step before doing anything risky, advise the user to try to make an image of the disk and save it to another reliable disk.

I never used Spinrite, yet I can clearly see many people online just jump on the takedown train and berate Mr. Gibson as charlatan, snakeoil salesman, with very poor arguments, often not giving any actual experience with the software, just their ideas why it can't be useful. Those who used it and really found it useless have much higher credibility, but those seem to be a very vocal minority, while there are many people who find the software useful.

> Probably not best practice but how do I check the SSD is fine in the first place, especially a blank SSD?

The only way that is certain to check the memory cells is to overwrite the whole drive, flush all disk cache (power cycle the system), read all the written bytes, and check that the values read are the same as the values that have been written. This could be accomplished e.g. by setting up encryption on the whole drive on the block level (e.g. on Linux, LUKS), writing zeroes to the open (decrypted) volume, and after power cycle, opening (decrypting) the volume again and checking that all bytes read are zero.

A simpler, less reliable, but still worthy test would be to do the same, except instead of checking the read values, just throwing them away (e.g. on Linux, redirecting to /dev/null). The disk firmware should still try to read all the sectors, and if it is not lying too much, show read problems/reallocated sectors in the SMART data.

Wait, is this for real, or an hypothetical example? Where can I read the memoirs?

This was quite an unpleasant read. Long wall of text on data recovery from HDDs and SSDs and how they changed... just to set the stage for what seems to be the intended message of the article - the assassination of Gibson and his product Spinrite?

> And solid state drives... while there is no doubt performance degradation over their lifetimes, failure modes tend to be all-or-nothing.

Not all drives are perfect until they suddenly die. In my experience, even modern-ish SSD drives (mainly Samsung 870 EVOs...) do develop problems continually. I've seen them both failing quite quickly, and also RAID controller rejecting several of them after some time of working well, then the drive still lived and could be used elsewhere, but in SMART data had bad numbers, including bad sectors (I know, it's SSD!). It's not all-or-nothing failure with SSDs.

> So what about SpinRite? Yeah, what about it? Why spend so much time (ours time) prepping ground for taking down something you do not really use, or have analyzed in detail? Why do you care?

> he doesn't seem to have updated his website in some time... By association, I suspect that GRC's flagship product, SpinRite, doesn't get a lot of active maintenance either.

What kind of a novel thought construction is that? These things need not be correlated. And if you checked, you would find he actually does update Spinrite, recently to 6.0 and 6.1.

> It seems reasonable on the surface, but it wouldn't make much sense with a drive with internal error correction.

It does make sense, because error correction isn't perfect, and sometimes you do get different data from the same sectors, after repeated reads (I've witnessed this on an 18TB drive, I don't know if it was due to a bad drive, or some bug somewhere along the way to my monitor, but it did happen. The drive works well now.).

And if the problem is an unreadable sector(s), and you want to read it, the more times you try, moving the head from different directions, with different internal state while reading (temperature, firmware, platter), the greater the chance one read will succeed.

> even tools dedicated to that purpose (like the open-source badblocks) are becoming rather questionable in comparison to the preemptive capabilities of modern HDDs.

Tools "like badblocks" - writing and reading the whole drive - are not questionable. They are the only quick way of checking if your new drive from the supplier has defective media. I don't do it with all drives, but when I have time and I want the drive to be solid, I do the test, and drives that log bad sectors get returned to supplier.

> their mentions of how SpinRite is a very powerful tool that one shouldn't run on SSDs too often, absolutely reek ...

Maybe there's a good reason for that, like there is a reason for not doing too many write benchmarks on SSDs. Flash degrades on writes, and maybe even on reads a little.

> I don't think SpinRite started as a scam, but I sure think it ended as one.

Based on what - it seems, old claims from an old webpage and bad logic arguments on why the claims are not believable for modern hardrives. Without checking and reporting on the new Spinrite on real drives with problems.

I've never used Spinrite, but this article did not convince me of anything, except the author doesn't like Gibson/his product, and writes a bad blog post about it.

Can you give some specific example of a claim that "cannot possibly be true" and explain why? And please do not just post links to an article by someone else, because I'm interested what claim you have found incorrect and what was your string of checks and arguments to that belief.

Thanks for the reference. The BBC series is actually called "The Secret War":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_War_(TV_series)

There is also a related book "Most Secret War":

https://archive.org/details/mostsecretwar0000jone_z9k2

Another completely misleading article on gravity batteries. All the solid weight stuff is bunk, probably designed to suck out money from naive investors / corrupt state officials. Moving solid weights gives only a very small electric power, so building the proposed solid weight batteries gives units of MW at most, which is uneconomical. Unless it transports a large lake of water up and down a hill like in pumped-storage hydroelectric plants, and can provide tens or hundreds of MW. Such installations are very expensive to build today, because all the low-hanging fruit options seem to have been already built.

Which model do you have? Have you used it for work with lots of static windows, or just for movies/games?

> rather than slapping things that work on top of each other, mindlessly using magic like containers.

I have exactly this problem. I need to run centos7-era binary application on rocky9, and of course, it does not compile on the new gcc compiler in rocky9, and also some libraries are missing/have changed too much.

I was thinking I will run the app in a centos7 container on rocky9 machine, but this creates lots of unwelcome complications and additional work.

I'm not very familiar with Nix, but it seems one could install Nix on rocky9 and then somehow use it to build my application against the centos7 devel libraries. Do you think this is a plausible pathway for compiling and running such an old application? It would be great if I could just compile the old app on the new system and forget about containers.

That is surprising view to me. I tried to explain why naive anti-regulation talk is not helpful for getting more nuclear energy. The way to have more nuclear energy is to embrace and strengthen the state interest in nuclear.

Coal plants emit more radionuclides into atmosphere, but nuclear plants produce more radionuclides overall (burnt fuel). This coal nuclear pollution is however still very small to the point of irrelevance, the real pollution problem is with CO2, dust and mining coal.

I did not say black swan nuclear disasters are a civilization-ending danger. I said people are afraid of them much more than of climate change.

Nuclear experts consider it safe because of existing regulations and because it is hard for sketchy company to launch a new plant.

The only way to end burning is government action, i.e. regulation.

The black swan big disasters have to be taken seriously too.

A nuclear accident creates a big and costly disaster suddenly. People don't like sudden big problems but can live with continuously growing ones.

Burning hydrocarbons is much more acceptable in that regard. CO2/dust pollution is accepted by society, because it is continuous and dilutes well. Killing millions is socially acceptable when it happens randomly all over the planet. Radioactive pollution due to coal burning is/should be negligible, most is(should be) filtered out in the smokestack scrubbers.

I don't like fossil power plants, but they are much easier to build and more acceptable to people than nuclear ones. That's why regulation and security have to be high with nuclear, to make it acceptable to most of society.

> civilization-ending danger

I don't think climate change is a civilization-ending danger in the coming decades. It already creates political problems, migration. If we keep pumping CO2 then maybe in hundred years.

Extreme events and subsequent changes are why it can be the "safest form of energy". After Chernobyl and Fukushima, regulation did change in those countries as well.

Commercial nuclear should be very hard, almost impossible. This seems to be the correct conclusion after all the accidents and the reasons for them - incompetent, self-serving management pushing dangerous commands on the personnel (Chernobyl,Three Mile Island) or normalizing bad architecture and security plans (Fukushima). Better expensive energy than another major nuclear accident.

Nuclear energy can be done safely as long as it is run by competent nuclear energy physicists/technicians with real authority, so they can and will shut down stupid ideas such as operating outside parameters because economy/boss said so. This seems to rule out commercial organizations. NRC is more benevolent than that, maybe they should actually be even tougher.

We should allow only competent states to build and operate nuclear plants, so science and rules take precedence to money and boss boot-licking.

This may push nuclear energy into unprofitable territory, depending on the market conditions, infrastructure, water and people resources. Which is fine by me - nuclear energy in some areas is so important for grid stability we should have it even if it is unprofitable.

Why do we need that? CA system with TLS certificates works well, even while DNS is not trusted. It's a good solution for websites.

That depends on what the customer does, no?

> However, z/OS also implements 64-bit Java, C, C++, and UNIX (Single UNIX Specification) APIs and applications through UNIX System Services – The Open Group certifies z/OS as a compliant UNIX operating system – with UNIX/Linux-style hierarchical HFS[NB 3][NB 4] and zFS file systems. These compatibilities make z/OS capable of running a range of commercial and open source software.[3] z/OS can communicate directly via TCP/IP, including IPv6,[4] and includes standard HTTP servers (one from Lotus, the other Apache-derived) along with other common services such as SSH, FTP, NFS, and CIFS/SMB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS

Although I like the argument that having an OS that does not require use of C is an interesting feature. Then it's really about the quality software platform, more than about the magic hardware.

> It's been tried many times before

Can you link some specific example? That may be an interesting read.

You might be right. Dave is to blame.

I agree. But that's a problem. People are easy to impress these days and don't think through what the message actually is.

This is what IBM and people living off mainframes tell the world all day long, but I think you'll have trouble showing that mainframe's job can't be replaced by a few hi-end x86 servers under cost.

Inertia, regulators, and company having lots of money to the point they don't care (banks...) explains mainframes. They do the job well, so why bother replacing them if you don't care that they cost more.

Nope. They made great software, and not so good hardware. They went away because dot-com bubble burst and tech world cancelled orders of the hardware. Also, bad business decisions linking their success with sales of hardware, instead of support for software.

> "Sun is responsible" for the problem, said a project manager at a large European bank that was affected by it. The manager spoke on condition of anonymity. "Their architecture was fundamentally flawed because there was no ECC checking on the cache memory. This is something you get in even the lowliest Intel processor that costs a few dollars," he said in an e-mail message.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2585204/sun-fixes-serv...

Yep, it's a dinosaur concept nobody with tight budget wants to pay for, unless they already do and money is no object(big Fortune 500 companies).