The disk mechanics will probably fail earlier. Same on the USB disks.
You can always make a dump of the entire disk and rewrite the content to it.

Kerr Avon wrote on 2022-12-11, 15:28:

Is it true that over time, the data on a mechanical hard drive can breakdown and become corrupted, due to the magnetic 'bits' of data losing their charges?

Yes.

Kerr Avon wrote on 2022-12-11, 15:28:

If so, then I'd imagine that there are utilities that can refresh the data, probably by going through the hard drive and reading each part of the data then writing that data anew over the old data, effectively bringing the charge of each bit of data back to full magnetic strength. If so, then are there any good, preferably free programs that can be recommend for this purpose? And how regularly should such a program be run on a hard drive?

It's called "scan for bad sectors", then repair. It's part of Windows' error checking utility under the Tools tab,. which appears after you right-click on a particular hard drive on Windows Explorer. It doesn't exactly write the data anew over the old data, but move data from bad sector to a new , good sector, to prevent data loss.

Back in the DOS days, I would have had run COMPRESS for that purpose.

It's a disk defragmenter, like DEFRAG.
In the options, it can be configured to use different methods of file sorting (directories first, files first etc).

By making the appropriate selection, the utility will be convinced to re-write all files on the disk accordingly.

Kerr Avon wrote on 2022-12-11, 15:28:

And do SSD drives, and USB sticks, and other re writable media, need refreshing in some way to prevent date loss due to age?

How long they can go without being powered depends on their quality but yes, memory card type devices will start to flip bits if left stored for long enough.

I’ve booted up drives that haven’t seen electricity in 20+ years without issue. I don’t think this is much of a concern except maybe on floppies/tapes?

I've seen decades old HDDs spin up and work but deteriorate and fail in minutes. When you are going to power one up you should be prepped to get data off it immediately. I would use a (pre-tested) USB adapter to access it.

If the data is extremely important I wouldn't power it up at all. Send it to a recovery company.

Kerr Avon wrote on 2022-12-11, 15:28:

Is it true that over time, the data on a mechanical hard drive can breakdown and become corrupted, due to the magnetic 'bits' of data losing their charges?

Yes it's true, Spinrite has a "refresh" scan that works exactly as you say. unfortunately it's not free though.
Luckily I've an old version from a job years ago. Comes in handy sometimes for old drives that don't play nice at first.
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

It's a powerful tool but not sure It's worth purchasing for retro PC usage. Simple defrag is probably enough as now you have to balance mechanical wear and tear on old drives vs "electronic rot"

I would second SpinRite. It can be very useful for last ditch recovery, short of sending it to Drive Savers or somewhere similar.
However, if your drive is larger than say 250GB or so you will likely have issues getting it to work properly.
As far as I know Gibson still hasn't released a 6.1 update that is supposedly supposed to recify this issue.

With all of that being said, if the data is critical then find a new media. Electro-mechanical drives don't last forever.

Jasin Natael wrote on 2022-12-16, 18:00:

With all of that being said, if the data is critical then find a new media. Electro-mechanical drives don't last forever.

That reminds me of a story of my father from the 70s.
In an university, they had an defective Fast Rand fixed-disk drive.

The arms/actuators didn't correctly function anymore, thus they couldn't "park" their heads on the outer position anymore.
Power down meant head crash/destruction of the platters and subsequent data loss.

The solution was to keep the fixed-disk drive running forever, to never power down.
The university even bought an automatic emergency generator for the fixed-disk drive.
This solution was less costly than replacing the fixed-disk drive and losing data.

Thanks for all the answers, everyone.

chinny22 wrote on 2022-12-16, 12:50:

Yes it's true, Spinrite has a "refresh" scan that works exactly as you say. unfortunately it's not free though. Luckily I've an […]
Show full quote

Kerr Avon wrote on 2022-12-11, 15:28:

Is it true that over time, the data on a mechanical hard drive can breakdown and become corrupted, due to the magnetic 'bits' of data losing their charges?

Yes it's true, Spinrite has a "refresh" scan that works exactly as you say. unfortunately it's not free though.
Luckily I've an old version from a job years ago. Comes in handy sometimes for old drives that don't play nice at first.
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

It's a powerful tool but not sure It's worth purchasing for retro PC usage. Simple defrag is probably enough as now you have to balance mechanical wear and tear on old drives vs "electronic rot"

Fair enough, thanks.

Jasin Natael wrote on 2022-12-16, 18:00:

I would second SpinRite. It can be very useful for last ditch recovery, short of sending it to Drive Savers or somewhere similar […]
Show full quote

I would second SpinRite. It can be very useful for last ditch recovery, short of sending it to Drive Savers or somewhere similar.
However, if your drive is larger than say 250GB or so you will likely have issues getting it to work properly.
As far as I know Gibson still hasn't released a 6.1 update that is supposedly supposed to recify this issue.

With all of that being said, if the data is critical then find a new media. Electro-mechanical drives don't last forever.

Hardly critical, we're talking the usual treasures of a hard drive, such as easily redownloadable games/utilities/whatever, duplicate files taking up lots of space, installation files of programs that I haven't used in decades, home photos, music files, archives I've made containing dozens of working mods set up to run with their associated game, etc. If I lost the lot then I wouldn't miss 95% of it, wouldn't even know what was lost, but like many people, I am a virtual hoarder, and I like to have backups of everything.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-12-16, 23:29:

That reminds me of a story of my father from the 70s. In an university, they had an defective Fast Rand fixed-disk drive. […]
Show full quote

Jasin Natael wrote on 2022-12-16, 18:00:

With all of that being said, if the data is critical then find a new media. Electro-mechanical drives don't last forever.

That reminds me of a story of my father from the 70s.
In an university, they had an defective Fast Rand fixed-disk drive.

The arms/actuators didn't correctly function anymore, thus they couldn't "park" their heads on the outer position anymore.
Power down meant head crash/destruction of the platters and subsequent data loss.

The solution was to keep the fixed-disk drive running forever, to never power down.
The university even bought an automatic emergency generator for the fixed-disk drive.
This solution was less costly than replacing the fixed-disk drive and losing data.

Wouldn't it be better to have copied everything off the hard drive, then replaced it with a new, non-faulty one?

swaaye wrote on 2022-12-13, 18:19:

I've seen decades old HDDs spin up and work but deteriorate and fail in minutes. When you are going to power one up you should be prepped to get data off it immediately. I would use a (pre-tested) USB adapter to access it.

If the data is extremely important I wouldn't power it up at all. Send it to a recovery company.

I doubt I'd ever be in that position, but it's very handy to know that, just in case, thanks.

Puran Diskfresh https://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html
Free and faster because it runs from windows. Spinrite has a bug that limits the hdd size to less than 640gb, in theory is a Bios bug but I've never found a solution for that, that's a big problem for nowadays hard disks.
Hdat 2 is free and can also be used to refresh but it is slower for that. https://www.hdat2.com/

I also recommend SpinRite. The latest version 6.1 is in alpha now and registered owners of 6.0 will have access to it shortly according to the last Security Now podcast I listened to. 6.1 will support drives over 2TB and run exponentially faster, meaning large drives will complete their scans in a sane amount of time. You also have free access to older versions, which work better on DOS-formatted drives and floppy drives. It's part of my maintenance plan for my retro systems. I use SR 5.0 on my DOS systems as well as my 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives. It helps prevent bad sectors from developing and can help relocate data on bad sectors to spare sectors. It's not cheap ($90) but I've used it so much in the 10 years I've owned it that it's more than paid for itself.

Hoping wrote on 2022-12-18, 15:23:

Puran Diskfresh https://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html
Free and faster because it runs from windows. Spinrite has a bug that limits the hdd size to less than 640gb, in theory is a Bios bug but I've never found a solution for that, that's a big problem for nowadays hard disks.
Hdat 2 is free and can also be used to refresh but it is slower for that. https://www.hdat2.com/

I've used Diskfresh and it's good, but it only does the equivalent of a level 2 scan, and does not have the ability to recover data -- only refresh it. SR can work the sectors much more thoroughly with higher level scans and also relocate data from bad sectors when the drive can't do it itself. I've run SR on drives up to 2TB (1.8TB formatted). For sure, it runs slow on these large drives, but it does work.

clueless1 wrote on 2022-12-18, 16:02:

Hoping wrote on 2022-12-18, 15:23:

Puran Diskfresh https://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html
Free and faster because it runs from windows. Spinrite has a bug that limits the hdd size to less than 640gb, in theory is a Bios bug but I've never found a solution for that, that's a big problem for nowadays hard disks.
Hdat 2 is free and can also be used to refresh but it is slower for that. https://www.hdat2.com/

I've used Diskfresh and it's good, but it only does the equivalent of a level 2 scan, and does not have the ability to recover data -- only refresh it. SR can work the sectors much more thoroughly with higher level scans and also relocate data from bad sectors when the drive can't do it itself. I've run SR on drives up to 2TB (1.8TB formatted). For sure, it runs slow on these large drives, but it does work.

What motherboard did you use? I could not find a good board.
Edit:
There's even a thread in the GRC forums from this year. https://forums.grc.com/threads/odd-spinrite-error.1032/

Hoping wrote on 2022-12-18, 16:10:

What motherboard did you use? I could not find a good board. Edit: There's even a thread in the GRC forums from this year. https […]
Show full quote

clueless1 wrote on 2022-12-18, 16:02:

Hoping wrote on 2022-12-18, 15:23:

Puran Diskfresh https://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html
Free and faster because it runs from windows. Spinrite has a bug that limits the hdd size to less than 640gb, in theory is a Bios bug but I've never found a solution for that, that's a big problem for nowadays hard disks.
Hdat 2 is free and can also be used to refresh but it is slower for that. https://www.hdat2.com/

I've used Diskfresh and it's good, but it only does the equivalent of a level 2 scan, and does not have the ability to recover data -- only refresh it. SR can work the sectors much more thoroughly with higher level scans and also relocate data from bad sectors when the drive can't do it itself. I've run SR on drives up to 2TB (1.8TB formatted). For sure, it runs slow on these large drives, but it does work.

What motherboard did you use? I could not find a good board.
Edit:
There's even a thread in the GRC forums from this year. https://forums.grc.com/threads/odd-spinrite-error.1032/

Okay, I've seen that error before, but I don't recall it being related to specific drive sizes. More with motherboard. I don't recall the exact motherboard model it works well on, but I do believe it is an Intel mobo from around the Core2 (Conroe) period. It has SATA and PATA ports, so I use it for all my HDD scans at work. At home, it works fine on my Pentium and 486 systems. I don't think I've tried it on my daily driver (Haswell based system). If I think of it, I'll get the motherboard model tomorrow when I'm at work.

Kerr Avon wrote on 2022-12-11, 15:28:

Is it true that over time, the data on a mechanical hard drive can breakdown and become corrupted, due to the magnetic 'bits' of […]
Show full quote

Is it true that over time, the data on a mechanical hard drive can breakdown and become corrupted, due to the magnetic 'bits' of data losing their charges?

If so, then I'd imagine that there are utilities that can refresh the data, probably by going through the hard drive and reading each part of the data then writing that data anew over the old data, effectively bringing the charge of each bit of data back to full magnetic strength. If so, then are there any good, preferably free programs that can be recommend for this purpose? And how regularly should such a program be run on a hard drive?

And do SSD drives, and USB sticks, and other re writable media, need refreshing in some way to prevent date loss due to age?

Thanks for any answers.

Solid state drives, are not as dureable as spinning platter. Basically get spinning platter in USB enclosure, and do weekly backup.

brostenen wrote on 2022-12-18, 19:33:

Kerr Avon wrote on 2022-12-11, 15:28:

Is it true that over time, the data on a mechanical hard drive can breakdown and become corrupted, due to the magnetic 'bits' of […]
Show full quote

Is it true that over time, the data on a mechanical hard drive can breakdown and become corrupted, due to the magnetic 'bits' of data losing their charges?

If so, then I'd imagine that there are utilities that can refresh the data, probably by going through the hard drive and reading each part of the data then writing that data anew over the old data, effectively bringing the charge of each bit of data back to full magnetic strength. If so, then are there any good, preferably free programs that can be recommend for this purpose? And how regularly should such a program be run on a hard drive?

And do SSD drives, and USB sticks, and other re writable media, need refreshing in some way to prevent date loss due to age?

Thanks for any answers.

Solid state drives, are not as dureable as spinning platter. Basically get spinning platter in USB enclosure, and do weekly backup.

That's true for any flash based storage device but we don't have a lot of 30 year old flash devices to be sure if they last 5 or 30 years and that 's the little cuestion. In theory a SD flash card may be unreadable after 5 years if it's not refreshed, but I've never seen that.
But what I've seen is 30 years , or more, old HDD's still working and readable. And I've also seen some new HDD's die after one week 😀
Maybe an intresting read about this matter is this https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard … stats-for-2020/

the norton utilities calibrate tool also did this for old hard drives while also being able to change the sector interleaving, and optimizing for max throughput.

Jasin Natael wrote on 2022-12-16, 18:00:

I would second SpinRite. It can be very useful for last ditch recovery, short of sending it to Drive Savers or somewhere similar […]
Show full quote

I would second SpinRite. It can be very useful for last ditch recovery, short of sending it to Drive Savers or somewhere similar.
However, if your drive is larger than say 250GB or so you will likely have issues getting it to work properly.
As far as I know Gibson still hasn't released a 6.1 update that is supposedly supposed to recify this issue.

With all of that being said, if the data is critical then find a new media. Electro-mechanical drives don't last forever.

That ship has sailed. It's been almost *19 years* since that buggy version 6 was released. I suspect we'll be waiting 190 more years before the fabled, nirvana magical "release 6.1" or mythical "release 7" is released. This makes Spinrite totally useless on pretty much *any* modern drive now. Sad, as it was good software.

Wonder why Gibson Research chose to alienate its customer-base so severely? They're useless at this point.