Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-Random Number Generator

Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by MertsA on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @04:54AM (#34801843)

Forget "ShieldsUp!" This is the guy who still sells SpinRite for $90 when it hasn't seen an update since 2004. It's old enough to vote at this point and Steve Gibson is always spouting off blatant lies about how it's great for recovering SSDs. He's claimed that it can magically read uncorrectable sectors on modern drives (SATA, not SAS, no SCSI READ LONG here and no ancient IDE drives that still supported READ LONG for ATA) and compare results to figure out what the original data was. He claims that it's data recovery software and that people should run it on a failing hard drive before trying to copy data off of it with a real data recovery program! That piece of garbage doesn't even support writing data to a separate disk, the only thing it can do is write the data the drive was able to read back to the failing drive itself.

The technical documentation claims stuff like that it disables bad sector allocation. That's actually a thing, but if you read the man page for some reputable software like hdparm you'll see a nice little note:

> Control of this feature via the -D option is not supported for most modern drives since ATA-4; thus this command may fail.

ATA-4 was standardized in 1998. It can probably actually disable write caching, but it's not like that's unique to SpinRite in the slightest. It's even trivial to change that on Windows which is otherwise horrible for anything low level involving disks. SpinRite doesn't even use LBA48 addressing so if your drive can't address the full capacity in ye olde CHS then too bad, but SpinRite will try to spin that as a problem with your BIOS, a problem with your SATA controller, etc.

I don't see why anyone respects anything he says given his long history of selling snake oil and other shyster tactics. Even the Wikipedia page for SpinRite looks astroturfed and the talk section has a bunch of responses from an unregistered user that all seem to have a similar tone and be suspiciously supportive of some of SpinRite's dubious claims.

If Steve Gibson told me that the sky was blue I think I'd have to go outside and check.

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=181&t=2929

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Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by pdonis on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @06:18PM (#34812390)

For a similar take on Gibson, see here:

https://radsoft.net/news/roundups/grc/

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Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by SixDouble5321 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @03:07AM (#34816220)

Doesn't sound like you have used Spinrite, but if you don't think it's worth the money don't buy it. Not sure what makes you think a developer has to reduce the price of their software, just because it's old. Adobe has done no such thing. The software still does what it did when it was first made. If you have a bug report, file it, my guess is that you don't.

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Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by MertsA on Thursday February 16, 2023 @08:16AM (#34818218)

And I doubt you've ever bought the Brooklyn Bridge but that doesn't mean you can't call out the con artist trying to sell it. The price of the snake oil isn't the problem. The problem is that he's scamming people out of money making a bunch of claims that fundamentally do not apply to modern drives. If you have a MFM hard drive that still spins after all this time and you want to do whatever low level interleave Spinrite supports on it then sure, it probably works just as well as it did back when that hardware didn't qualify as antique. Most people getting suckered into buying Spinrite aren't going to have anything that ancient and for what Spinrite can actually do on somewhat modern drives, you might as well just use ddrescue, it'll do a better job.

> If you have a bug report, file it, my guess is that you don't.

This is extra hilarious in light of the fact that there have been plenty of bug reports against 6.0 reported well over a decade ago. Steve promised they'll be fixed in 6.1 which is totally coming out any day now.

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