Mike Bilow <mik...@colossus.bilow.com> writes:
>
> > SpinRite will read every block on the disk, to make sure they still
> > can be read. This is useful. But even CHKDSK/SCANDISK will do that,
> > and have since DOS 6, circa 1993.
>
> As explained, SpinRite went directly to the hardware, which was the only
> way to bypass ECC. By the way, CHKDSK does not by default read every
> sector: the "/R" switch is required to enable that behavior, and it
> certainly could never disable ECC.
>
> > SpinRite will read-and-rewrite blocks. There are scenarios where
> > this may be a plausible benefit, such as allowing the drive's built-in
> > relocation mechanism to relocate a marginal sector. But "badblocks
> > -n" will do the same thing, for free.
>
> SpinRite was not looking for bad blocks, which are easy enough to find,
> but for "gray area" blocks that were good enough to be readable with ECC
> enabled but not good enough to be readable with ECC disabled.
But, how do you circumvent the sector-remapping that modern drives do?
(and, if the answer is `you don't', then what is SpinRite actually
doing that's useful *today*? And haven't some of Gibson's
`direct manipulation' claims basically decayed into outright lies?)
And what about everything that John Navas included in his critique?
https://groups.google.com/group/comp.dcom.xdsl/msg/9aeee32323c2978e?dmode=source&hl=en
And...:
> > To read a bad block, SpinRite will try tricks like seeking to
> > adjacent cylinders/heads/sectors and back again, in various
> > directions. This was plausible for ancient drives, but everything
> > made in the past 20 years or so has abstracted the real disk geometry
> > away from the host, even when presenting "CHS". So these tricks are
> > meaningless on anything that isn't old enough to run for congress.
>
> This is largely true, but even so simple an action as explicitly
> flushing the cache can help. SpinRite was, again, originally intended as
> a preventative maintenance tool and took off into feature creep where it
> was marketed as a recovery tool and began to be regarded as a magic
> panacea. Its underlying theory of operation was certainly plausible and
> in my opinion correct, but it continued to be sold on its reputation
> long after it was no longer useful. Even so, in the modern era you are
> probably better off using something like "smartmontools" to initiate a
> long self-test on the device.rather than manually test-reading every
> block on a regular basis.
[...]
> Gibson has a personality, but he walks the walk as well as talks the
> talk. I've had occasion to ask him very detailed technical questions and
> he knew his stuff. Gibson's claim about interfacing directly to hardware
> with register-level awareness was absolutely true in the days of
> proprietary controllers
[...]
> Yes, SpinRite was misunderstood and overhyped, and it stuck around as a
> magic elixir for far longer than it should have, but 25 years ago it was
> a remarkably effective and prescient utilization of stone knives and
> bear skins.
In other words..., Gibson *used to* appear to know what he was talking
about, and SpinRite *was* actually not-a-scam 25 years ago, but you guys
agree that *today* it's pure snake oil?
--
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."
_______________________________________________
gnhlug-discuss mailing list
gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org
http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
