I’ve just purchased a copy of SpinRite 6.0. After I’ve heard so much about it, I decided it’s time to give it a go. At USD 89, it is not exactly cheap. I could get a brand new 320 GB drive for that price. However, if you’re trying to recover lost data, then it is probably worth every cent of it. My current situation doesn’t fall under that category.

I’ve recently been losing data from one of my hard drives. Although the files that have been lost or corrupted so far aren’t particularly important, I can no longer trust the drive for anything. It is now sitting in my computer as an archived drive whereby all the data on it has been previously backed up to another storage media. At approximately 4 years old, the drive has lasted past its average life span. But since it’s an 80 GB drive and still seems to be going reasonably well, perhaps SpinRite could salvage it. SpinRite is working on it right at this moment. Hence, why I’ve free time to blog about it now. It will take approximately 4 hours to scan the 80 GB drive.

If it’s just that one dying drive, I probably wouldn’t have purchased SpinRite. However, I have 6 hard drives with a total capacity of just under 1 TB. I don’t know why I have so much storage. Chances are, it has something to do with me getting a new drive every time I run out of disk space rather than archiving any of the data. This has gotten a bit worrying as 1 TB of data is a lot of stuff to lose. So I figure, SpinRite would help protect me from the inevitable and that’s probably worth more than the USD 89. I’m also working on a backup policy at this stage and will share it once I’ve got it up and going.