Overview

SpinRite 6.1 is our “catch up” update of SpinRite 6.0 before we head to SpinRite 7.
Before beginning work on SpinRite 7 and leaving SpinRite 6 behind forever, we wanted to bring SpinRite 6 as current as we could in any BIOS / DOS / TEXT-based utility. As you'll see below, and when you run SpinRite 6.1 for yourself the first time, that goal has been achieved.

SpinRite now runs directly-connected IDE and SATA drives as fast as they can go (246 seconds to scan an entire 120GB SSD). This is a pace that's practical for even today's largest drives. v6.1 also brings a constellation of new features for both casual and power users. Though we have big plans for SpinRite 7, v6.1 will hold us until v7.0 is ready.

The page below provides a quick summary of what's new and different in v6.1, and SpinRite's online user manual fills in any additional details. GRC is now hosting an active online web forum filled with knowledgeable SpinRite users, many who worked with us throughout v6.1's 3+ year development.

New features

• Amazingly fast. SpinRite 6.0 owners have expressed surprise over v6.1's speed. SpinRite's native hardware drivers for parallel (IDE/ATA) and serial (SATA/AHCI) drives run drives at their absolute maximum speed. v6.1 uses large 16-megabyte I/O transfer buffers to transfer 32,768 sectors at a time to minimize per-transfer overhead:In the example above, two SATA drives are attached using SpinRite's native AHCI driver. The first is a 120 gigabyte Sandisk SSD which v6.1 can scan in 4.1 minutes. The second drive is an 8-terabyte Seagate “spinner” which v6.1 can scan in approximately 15 hours. While this is not instantaneous, this is 64-trillion bits, and it wasn't ever practical for SpinRite 6.0 to work with drives of size – now it is.
• Compatible with drives of any size (30 terabytes? no sweat) and as shown above, SpinRite's new speed makes it practical to run SpinRite across large modern drives.
• v6.1's native IDE/ATA/SATA/AHCI hardware drivers further improve SpinRite's error detection, correction and data recovery.
• At startup, all drives are discovered and presented in a clear list showing drive type and connection port, it's runtime age (usually in power-on hours), size, model and serial number:SpinRite's new “list” command-line option dumps this list to the console for documentation and command-line drive section by type, port, size, model or serial.
• DynaStat's data recovery is now time-limited with command-line control over the time limit. During DynaStat recovery an on-screen remaining time countdown is displayed:
• The SMART monitoring page shows a greater number of drive health parameters:
• Awareness of SSD and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives:
• Awareness of 4K-byte physical sectoring drives to offer improved and accelerated data recovery.
• Five redesigned operating levels.
• The most recent results log may be reviewed after returning to the Main Menu.
• Very large (8 million character) log history review scroll-back.
• Comprehensive command-line drive listing:
• The Command-line may now be used to select drive(s), operating range and much more:
• Drive over-temperature monitoring can now auto-resume after cooling and the number of cooling pauses will be added to the log.
• SpinRite under Windows has a new highly-robust USB “thumb drive” prep system.
• Option to prevent SpinRite's rewrite repair of incompletely recovered sectors. This might be useful if a drive might later be sent to a data recovery company since it will prevent overwriting sectors whose data that might be recoverable later.

Miscellaneous convenience features

• Built-in FAQ including a brief command-line summary:
• Many older AMI BIOSes contain a critical bug which overwrites the system's memory and prevents accessing USB drives larger than 137 gigabytes. v6.1 recognizes and patches these BIOSes for safe operation under SpinRite.
• The screen blanker turns RED to show, at a glance, when an error has been encountered while blanked.
• Automatic drive benchmarking before, after or both.
• Successively numbered log files saved into “SRLOGS” subdirectory.
• Tiny GRC text editor included for reviewing logs and editing startup configuration.
• Backspace may be pressed four times in succession to re-initialize the display. This may be useful if the screen was detached or powered off while SpinRite is running when it does not reinitialize itself automatically.
• Option to force a drive that fails verification to be used anyway.
• A fast SATA III device connected to a slower SATA II port will be highlighted since it might run faster (under SpinRite and later under an operating system) if a SATA III port is available for the drive:
• Logs are written incrementally rather than all at the end to prevent loss of records if an operation is interrupted by power failure.
• SpinRite's starting and stopping points can be specified either by percent or exact sector number.

Minor changes

• The use of Shift-Enter has been changed to the Tab key for greater keyboard compatibility.
• The currently chosen Level is now shown in the Main Menu:
• The keyboard should now work with older Intel Apple Mac machines.
• “Quiet” mode (sound effects suppressed) is shown in the upper-right of the screen.

What has not changed yet?

• SpinRite 6.1 remains a DOS program, though it now extensively uses 32-bit code and memory. DOS cannot boot on UEFI machines which do not also offer BIOS compatibility, though many do. (SpinRite 7 will boot on either BIOS or UEFI).
• SpinRite 6.1 has fast native drivers for parallel (IDE) and serial (SATA) drives. But drives attached by USB must still be accessed through the BIOS. Most (though not all) BIOSes limit SpinRite's speed, and some older BIOSes may also impose a limit on USB drive's maximum size. All of these remaining limitations will be removed by SpinRite 7 which will have native high-speed hardware drivers for USB and NVMe drives.

Features removed

• Partition Awareness – SpinRite v6.1 runs on entire drives (or user-specified portions of drives) rather than within individual drive partitions. Partition awareness will return in future editions of SpinRite – as will full file system awareness, individual file recovery, data recovery drive with cloning and much more. Since this is the end of the line for SpinRite v6, it did not make sense to create code that would not be portable to SpinRite's next (non-DOS) operating system.
• Diskette recovery – SpinRite's diskette recovery technology was consuming a great deal of space and in 2024 will be rarely, if ever, needed or used. SpinRite 6.1 owners are automatically licensed to use SpinRite v5.0 which had the best diskette data recovery ever (in human history). So if diskette recovery is needed, it will always be available from SpinRite v5.0.

What comes next

SpinRite has a bright future. During the early stages of SpinRite v6.1's development, we discovered that SpinRite's new native drivers would allow us to accurately locate regions of mass memory which were slow to read. We later discovered that in at least some instances these slow regions were “pre-failure” and that re-writing them could both improve the device's speed and its reliability. SpinRite 7 will be able to accurately map mass storage media performance – both magnetic and solid-state – to provide very early warning of media trouble and to reverse such pending trouble.

SpinRite 7 will employ a contemporary graphical user-interface, will be able to run on many or all of the machine's drives at once, fully multi-tasking, and will be able to boot on machines using either BIOS or UEFI startup firmware.