Heard Fr Robert Ballecer, SJ say he had actually built a dedicated Spinrite machine I know ...

[G+_Ronald Stepp]

Heard Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ say he had actually built a dedicated Spinrite machine... I know he is saving the video for "when he is feeling lazy" but would love to know what kind of case he used. I saw a Lian-Li case called the PC-T80, but it's VERY hard to find one in stock anywhere. Any chance someone knows that basic building block he started with?

[G+_David Radke]

A plain old case with hard drive docks (usb or sata). That's all you need.

[G+_Ronald Stepp]

Any suggestions for swappable hard drive bays?

[G+_Randy Beavers]

He 3d printed one ;+)

[G+_Ronald Stepp]

I actually am just happy I finally got spinrite to run again, everything I have is UEFI and even with secure boot disabled I couldn't get it to run. Finally saw a post where someone suggested making a MS-DOS bootable floppy, so after ordering a USB 3.5 inch floppy drive, and some floppies I installed the bootable MS-DOS to it, copied spinrite to it and it ran like a champ on boot up one the same machine. So now I just need to build a small machine with easy accessible hard drive access to the SATA ribbon... that way I don't tie up my main machine... actually thinking now, I could probably hit a few pawn shops and see what they have in the way of computers..

[G+_David Wiggins]

Ronald Stepp?. I'd look for an older PC like the old media center machines. They often had smaller form factor and lower power draw. Also, if they bridged the era of PATA (IDE) and SATA for drives, so you could run either type.

Added bonus is it uses legacy BIOS rather than EFI.

 

I have one set aside for SpinRite, KillDisk, and CloneZilla. I just set it and walk away for however long it takes.

[G+_Ronald Stepp]

cool.. would also be good for running truecrypt on disks that you are going to trash and want to make sure nobody gets any old data off it.. run truecrypt with a 64-digit random key from grc.com and don't write it down.. once truecrypt gets done whole disk encrypting it with the key you don't know, nobody on the planet will retrieve any of the old data off it... toss or reformat as needed.grc.com - Home of Gibson Research Corporation

[G+_Rud Dog]

Just attempted to run spinrite on a drive connected via USB and the time to run was in the 800 or more hours? Then tried same drive mounted in the bay it was like 300 hours? Drive size it one TB. Must be dong something wrong. Downloaded the pdf of the program but it does not match the current version. Anyone seen a simple "how-to" for usage looked at the video by SG and still didn't seem to shorten the time for running Level 2.

[G+_Ronald Stepp]

Rud Dog it will give big numbers at first since it's just guessing as it goes and refines that number..

[G+_Ronald Stepp]

I just discovered that if I boot my Wacom Cintiq2 to my DOS spinrite, it doesn't even SEE the SSD Drive and I have no clue how to open the Cintiq to get at the guts.

[G+_Ronald Stepp]

Ordered this for $40 bucks from eBay as my Spinrite machine...

 

Dell OptiPlex 745 USFF 80 GB, Intel Core 2 Duo , 1.86GHZ, 2GB RAM w/ PS

 

No Operating system included... darnit. 8 )

[G+_Ben Reese]

Ronald Stepp might re-think that trucrypt idea for scrambling the data. Unless I am misunderstanding how that process works, it could leave un-encrypted data on the drive. There are tools to recover some data from HDDs even after the data has been overwritten. Probably not much, but could be just enough if you're paranoid.

[G+_Ben Reese]

Is there anything halfway comparable to Spinrite that will work on 3 TB drives? If I ever get to build my NAS I'd like to use 3 TB drives but I know Spinrite won't run on them.

[G+_Ronald Stepp]

Ben Reese more of a concern with SSDs than HDDs.

[G+_David Wiggins]

Ben Reese?, SpinRite does work in 3 TB drives, it just takes an ungodly long time. That's actually why I originally decided to set up a dedicated box (it's also good to keep track of% complete in case you need to stop/restart)

 

Ronald Stepp?, it will work on SSDs, just only use level 2. It will help trying like botched, unused or incomplete trim. Also, since level two only does reads, it accomplishes two things. First, it doesn't add wear/tear by using up write cycles. Second, if there is a read error, or enough of a slow down, it can trigger the SSD firmware error correction to notice a dying cell, relocate the data, and mark the cell appropriately. It essentially forces what would happen on the next read of that cell normally, but rather than it happening at random during regular use and slowing the system, it gets it done all at once.

 

There's also some other stuff going on, but my brain is to tired to tell me what.