NASLite Network Attached Storage

I've owned this software for less than a year - but probably have pumped several terabytes through it, and now use it to prep all drives before placing them into service:

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


While I've had some success in using this product for data recovery - its primary utility (for me) is prevention - by locking out all access to marginal sectors.

In this mode, spinrite simply "flips" the bits on every spot on the disk twice. If any sector hiccups during the flipping process, it moves the data from that spot - then marks it for "non use".

Spinrite seems to be a very sensitive test of disk health. There is never any pattern. Sometimes it "marks" new disks or very old disks extensively. Other times it completely passes disks with 10,000+ hrs of use.

While I wish I better understood the failure mechanisms involved with mass produced drives .... Spinright has done a good job in helping us avoid these problems. If nothing else, it helps you know when it's time to throw that drive away..

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but for the most part Spinrite is a complete ripoff/scam/snake oil product.

Read here for a complete explanation: http://www.grcsucks.com/

This 'prep' you speak of is nothing more than a fancy way (with moving graphics on the screen) of low-level formatting a drive. Something you can do for free with tools provided by most (if not all) drive manufacturers. They also provide low-level drive testing utilities.


If the program has any useful function, it is limited to the 'recovery' process. Everything else is just a scam.

Keep in mind, these are my opinions--YMMV. If it works for you and you think I'm full of it, go right ahead. Google it, read grcsucks.com, do your own research. My only goal is to keep someone from spending $$ on something they can do themselves, for free.

-lgm-

Yeah, I knew about this site prior to purchase...and I even obtained a refund for the our first copy of Spinrite (no internal provision for large disks LBA when used with old equipment - what were they thinking?). And Radsoft's opinions are much respected here.

But after some storage "incidents", I relicensed his software and have been using it heavily since.

It's recovered things my other tools could not. Works for me.

I've used it to recover things as well--and I can say that it does seem to do that pretty well (though admittedly, I don't know that scandisk or chkdsk wouldn't do just as good of a job)

As for the rest of it's claimed 'features' I just don't believe them... as for 'prepping' the drive, you can achieve the same thing from any *nix flavored OS with dd if=/dev/urandom (or /dev/zero or /dev/random) of=/dev/hd* (or /dev/sd* or /dev/wd*) bs=512k or something similar and running it twice. (i.e. "byte-flipping")

Just for completeness, here's links to all the major manufacturers' drive utilities and diagnostics:


IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test (DFT) & DDD-SI
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Seagate SeaTools (diagnostics) and DiscWizard (low-level formatting)
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/utils.html

Maxtor/Quantum PowerMax
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools (DLT)
http://support.wdc.com/download/downloadxml.asp

Fujitsu Diagnostic Tool (fjdt) and Fujitsu Erase Utility (fjerase)
http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com/support/hard-drives/software_utilities.html

Samsung SUTIL, HUTIL, and Shdiag
http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/hutil.htm