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About SpinRite
SpinRite is a mass-storage maintenance and data recovery program from Steve Gibson's Gibson Research Corporation, sold since the late 1980s. It runs from its own boot media rather than inside the installed operating system, which lets it work on a drive directly.
The current release is version 6.1, and owners of earlier versions can upgrade. It suits people who want to maintain aging drives or try to recover data from a drive that has started to fail.
Strengths
- Runs from boot media, independent of the installed system
- Combines drive maintenance with data recovery
- Long-maintained product with a current 6.1 release
Limitations
- Paid, with no free tier
- Closed source
- Requires booting the machine into SpinRite to use
Details
- Pricing
- PaidCommercial software sold by GRC, with an upgrade path to version 6.1 for existing owners.
- License
- Proprietary
- Developer
- Gibson Research Corporation
- Platforms
- Windows
- How it runs
- Downloadable app
- Works offline
- Yes
- Best suited for
- Maintaining aging drives and attempting recovery from failing ones
- Categories
- Disk tools
- Last verified
- Added
- Provenance
- Facts checked against the developer's own pages and store listings, 1 sources on file.
Alternatives to SpinRite
Compare allSoftware that can replace SpinRite for an important use case, and what changes if you switch.
HDDScan
A free Windows utility for testing hard drives and SSDs, reading SMART data and running surface tests.
HDDScan is free and runs inside Windows instead of booting, offering surface tests and SMART readings, though its erase test mode destroys data on the tested area.
GNU ddrescue
A command-line data recovery tool that copies raw blocks from failing disks while working around read errors.
GNU ddrescue is free and open source, copying raw blocks from a failing disk around read errors, but it is command-line only with no native Windows build listed.
Parted Magic
A bootable disk utility for partitioning, cloning, rescuing, benchmarking and securely erasing drives from a USB stick.
Parted Magic also boots from USB or DVD and adds partitioning, cloning, benchmarking and secure erase, but it requires a paid subscription rather than a one-off purchase.
Hiren's BootCD PE
Bootable Windows PE rescue environment full of diagnostic and repair tools.
Hiren's BootCD PE is a free bootable Windows PE environment bundling partitioning, imaging, recovery and hardware testing tools, though building the ISO needs your own Windows components.
Similar software
Related functionality, not necessarily a direct replacement.
smartmontools
Reads the SMART health data built into disks and runs self-tests, giving advance warning before a drive fails.
CrystalDiskInfo
Reads the health data your drives already record and tells you plainly whether one is dying.
GSmartControl
A graphical interface for smartctl that shows the health of hard drives and SSDs.
TestDisk & PhotoRec
Recovers lost partitions, makes non-booting disks bootable again, and undeletes files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext filesystems.
SeaTools
Seagate's free diagnostic tool for checking the health of hard drives and SSDs.
DriveDx
A Mac utility that monitors SSD and HDD health through SMART data and warns before failure.
