Spinrite 6.1 query

I bought Spinrite 6.0 many years ago. When GRC mailed me to get a free upgrade to v6.1, of course, I downloaded it, but have never used it. I watched the walkthrough this morning, and it looks as though I should. Can anyone give me feedback on their experiences with it, please?

I bought Spinrite as it fascinated me, but had no need of it as I do'nt sem to suffered any data corruption. It was as fascinating as the early defrag programs where you watched little coloured squares been moved around.

I used to use it on my HDD's but abandoned it when my machines came with SSD's. After watching the walkthrough video today, it seems to be a good idea to run it on all my machines now in order to restore SSD health to maximum performance.

There is a good Wikipedia article. Gibson himself has said not to use any but 'Level 1' on an SSD.

I run SR 6.1 from a VM on three on my PC's every 6 months to refresh the SSD's to maximum performance, and yesterday was one of those days. Running it in a VM is required as the normal USB boot process will not work for a UEFI only PC. This VM setup process is not trivial and requires the install on an external SSD/HDD, but worth the effort if you want to keep your SSD's peak shape.

The "Level 1" only use is old outdated advise. Level 3 is required to optimize an SSD. I ran this level on the 1st 15% with one PC, and 50% on the 2nd. The 3rd one did not need a tune-up.

Quandary said:

I run SR 6.1 from a VM on three on my PC's every 6 months to refresh the SSD's to maximum performance, and yesterday was one of those days.

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When I run any program in the VM on my system, the only 'disks' that are used and thus 'maintained' are the virtual disks, which are a part of the normal system disk (if setup like that). So for me it seems that using a disk maintaining program on a VM is a useless action!

Optimizing a SSD partition can easily be done by the built-in disk-optimizer of MS-Windows itself. That is starting a TRIM action on the SSD and that TRIM is all you normally need to do to optimize SSD drives.

I'm singing with the chorus that wonders why I'd need this program given the characteristics of SSD drives...

Kees said:

When I run any program in the VM on my system, the only 'disks' that are used and thus 'maintained' are the virtual disks, which are a part of the normal system disk (if setup like that). So for me it seems that using a disk maintaining program on a VM is a useless action!

Optimizing a SSD partition can easily be done by the built-in disk-optimizer of MS-Windows itself. That is starting a TRIM action on the SSD and that TRIM is all you normally need to do to optimize SSD drives.

Click to expand...

The custom VM build that is installed on an external drive running Windows allows the internal drives to be mounted when it is booted. This get around the UEFI limitation and allows SR to work on the drives. So not a useless action. I can point you to the well documented steps on how to build this configuration.

The cells affected by a loss of charge are typically those at the logical start of the drive where the OS is installed and most of those cells are them static. An alternative to SR would be to perform an image backup of a drive and then do a restore. This effectively writes to the cells bring them back up to nominal charge.

Sorry, TRIM does not perform the required to read and rewrite the cells which allow them to be recharged. Perform an HDTune Benchmark on the drive before and after TRIM to identify if there is any change in the slow performing areas of the drive. Yes, running SR at Level 3 reduces the life of the drive by a small fraction, just like daily use of the drive. The trade-off is having a slow performing drive that lasts a long time, or having a drive performing at its peak that will likely outlive the life of your PC.

This is an frequent question, and it's hard to find a definitive answer. Many opinions suggest that having the SSD powered will slow the the deterioration of the data, but a write to the cell is the only way to "refresh" the data.

Quandary said:

The custom VM build that is installed on an external drive running Windows allows the internal drives to be mounted when it is booted.

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I consider that as not being a VM (virtual machine) but just as booting from an external (flash) drive.

Like from the Hiren's boot CD (on flash drive). Of course in that way you can reach all drives, but that is a clearly other method than a Virtual Machine.

A Virtual Machine (like Virtual Box, VMware, Hyper-V and others) is running under the default Windows or Linux system and on it you can install any kind of OS (other Windows, Linux, you name it) and where that system only can reach a reserved part of the drive but has no connection whatsoever with the drives of the main system.

gunrunnerjohn said:

This is an frequent question, and it's hard to find a definitive answer. Many opinions suggest that having the SSD powered will slow the the deterioration of the data, but a write to the cell is the only way to "refresh" the data.

Click to expand...

May I suggest that you do your own analysis over 12-24 months, drive always powered on or not. Every 3 months run an HDTest benchmark of the SSD. Save the performance graphs and compare them over time. Also record the estimate remaining life of the drive at that time. One way of getting the remaining life on Win 11 is System>Storage>Disks & volumes.

Kees said:

I consider that as not being a VM (virtual machine) but just as booting from an external (flash) drive.

Click to expand...

I was not explicit enough. A Windows bootable external drive was created, a VM was installed, an SR bootable CD image was added to the VM, and SSD defined/attached to the VM. Then SR was run inside the VM. This allows SR to be booted and run on a UEFI only PC.

Is it a VM of not.. does not really matter as long as the entire collective does what is needed.

Quandary said:

May I suggest that you do your own analysis over 12-24 months, drive always powered on or not. Every 3 months run an HDTest benchmark of the SSD. Save the performance graphs and compare them over time. Also record the estimate remaining life of the drive at that time. One way of getting the remaining life on Win 11 is System>Storage>Disks & volumes.

Click to expand...

I'm afraid I'm not that interested at to put significant effort into it. I have multiple redundant backups on SSD, HDD, and a cloud backup. The chances of me losing data because of SSD bit rot is very close to zero.

diskfresh can be run in read only mode