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Yesterday I attended a presentation by Western Digital that discussed various innovations in rotating hard drive internals, including perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), etc. And of course, there's flash-based SSDs.

I am wondering whether reading and re-writing bits still does anything to prevent or predict failure in modern drives, as SpinRite advertises.

  1. For SSDs, I am rather convinced that SpinRite is either useless or hurts, since the drive's internal controller already relocates and masks bad sectors. Please correct me if I am wrong.
  2. For rotating disks, do modern materials/techniques still benefit from a "refresh" (read followed by write)? If any block is bad/failing, would the drive expose it to SpinRite, or would it silently relocate/mask it akin to SSDs?

Note that I am not interested in anecdotes ("I used SpinRite last week and now my PC once again that new hard drive smell"), but rather in specifics about how SpinRite interacts with modern hard drives and their controllers.

Philip
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@Philip adding this update since your answer wasn't posted for a while.
1. Ref. above response from Ramhound the non-destructive level-1/level-2 modes are still effective & are supported for data recovery on SSD media without any detriment to the life of your drive.
2. The tool does operate on current technology & still resolves the same general types of data loss scenarios as the company advertises. Other products may be desirable for realtime, maintenance-only applications to avoid the lengthy scan cycles that require exclusive access to your system (designed for preventive repairs vs. catastrophic failures).

There are apparently some configurations where the software cannot access the drive if your mainboard/controller is preventing this. In these cases removing it to another supported platform would be justified for critical data recovery. Plenty of reviews & testimonials online, see independent overview here: http://www.fact-reviews.com/info/spinrite.aspx.

Although the full Spinrite 6.0 documentation is not being distributed it's still available to licensed users via the online help system. Version 7.0 is not forthcoming yet for improved speed/compatibility features but the existing product is more than sufficient as-is for a wide variety of hardware.

Alan1
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