This was quite an unpleasant read. Long wall of text on data recovery from HDDs and SSDs and how they changed... just to set the stage for what seems to be the intended message of the article - the assassination of Gibson and his product Spinrite?

> And solid state drives... while there is no doubt performance degradation over their lifetimes, failure modes tend to be all-or-nothing.

Not all drives are perfect until they suddenly die. In my experience, even modern-ish SSD drives (mainly Samsung 870 EVOs...) do develop problems continually. I've seen them both failing quite quickly, and also RAID controller rejecting several of them after some time of working well, then the drive still lived and could be used elsewhere, but in SMART data had bad numbers, including bad sectors (I know, it's SSD!). It's not all-or-nothing failure with SSDs.

> So what about SpinRite?
Yeah, what about it? Why spend so much time (ours time) prepping ground for taking down something you do not really use, or have analyzed in detail? Why do you care?

> he doesn't seem to have updated his website in some time... By association, I suspect that GRC's flagship product, SpinRite, doesn't get a lot of active maintenance either.

What kind of a novel thought construction is that? These things need not be correlated. And if you checked, you would find he actually does update Spinrite, recently to 6.0 and 6.1.

> It seems reasonable on the surface, but it wouldn't make much sense with a drive with internal error correction.

It does make sense, because error correction isn't perfect, and sometimes you do get different data from the same sectors, after repeated reads (I've witnessed this on an 18TB drive, I don't know if it was due to a bad drive, or some bug somewhere along the way to my monitor, but it did happen. The drive works well now.).

And if the problem is an unreadable sector(s), and you want to read it, the more times you try, moving the head from different directions, with different internal state while reading (temperature, firmware, platter), the greater the chance one read will succeed.

> even tools dedicated to that purpose (like the open-source badblocks) are becoming rather questionable in comparison to the preemptive capabilities of modern HDDs.

Tools "like badblocks" - writing and reading the whole drive - are not questionable. They are the only quick way of checking if your new drive from the supplier has defective media. I don't do it with all drives, but when I have time and I want the drive to be solid, I do the test, and drives that log bad sectors get returned to supplier.

> their mentions of how SpinRite is a very powerful tool that one shouldn't run on SSDs too often, absolutely reek ...

Maybe there's a good reason for that, like there is a reason for not doing too many write benchmarks on SSDs. Flash degrades on writes, and maybe even on reads a little.

> I don't think SpinRite started as a scam, but I sure think it ended as one.

Based on what - it seems, old claims from an old webpage and bad logic arguments on why the claims are not believable for modern hardrives. Without checking and reporting on the new Spinrite on real drives with problems.

I've never used Spinrite, but this article did not convince me of anything, except the author doesn't like Gibson/his product, and writes a bad blog post about it.