Spinrite 6 Maintenance ?

[Intimidator]

Howdy Gang,

I have been reading more and more about Spinrite v6 but there seems to be a serious lack of documentation for v6. There also seems to be some confusion on what level should be used for maintenance purposes that should be run ever few months. According to the opening few screens of the app Mr. Gibson says to use level 4. But many people seem to use all sorts of levels for this purpose. The only documentation seems to be for v5. On his website there was an article from Jay S:

http://www.sysopt.com/tutorials/article ... _3549006_2

He states level 2 is for maintenance and level 4 is to fix problems and recover data....now this is the opposite from what Gibson says.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

[algrinch]

I ran Level 5 on a couple of drives with no problems, no data loss, no errors reported. I used it to make sure the drives were reliable. My understanding, when I read the screen during use of the program, was that Level 5 performs all tests and recovers data from any damaged areas.

I don't think it hurts anything to run level 5. If there is nothing wrong with the drive there won't be any data to recover.

I ran the program on a 60 GB drive and a 10 GB drive. Each drive took over 2 hours.

I regularly back up all of my data anyway. If I had run into problems I would have restored a back up from DVD.

Not sure if that helps you or not....