Spin cycle. (Software Review) (SpinRite II) (evaluation)

Speedread

A PCs hard disk requires a little spring cleaning from time to time due to the weakening of magnetic storage fields caused by time, erasure, write-over and other factors. SpinRite II reformats the disk quickly and easily, while maintaining data on the disk so that manual reloading is not necessary.

Disk lore tells us that hard disks, aside from requiring frequent backups, also need to be cleaned off and reformatted using the "low-level" format about every six months. As you may know, hard disk storage of data is magnetic. Apparently, the magnetization is short-lived, with time, erasure, write-over and other variables contributing to the weakening of the magnetic fields. (I'll bet temperature is another contributing factor the electronics types don't talk about.) Magnetic degradation is signified by the appearance of bad sector errors and the occasional loss of data. This means you have to back up …