ValiDrive

I've been known to eat some crow and here I go again.

I'm a long time follower of Security Now with Steve Gibson on the TWiT network. I've also been a user of SpinRite.

But over the years, SpinRite has bumped into some limitations, e.g. disk size, speed, and no support for UEFI.

Steve has been working on SpinRite 6.1 which will address disk size and speed as well as add some new features.

SpinRite 6.1 was almost wrapped up when Steve got distracted with what seemed like a random project.

He discovered that some of the cheap USB drives on Amazon didn't contain as much memory as they advertised. Worse, they would accept writes to sectors beyond their capacity without complaining.

There goes your data.

So Steve set aside SpinRite 6.1 and began developing ValiDrive to validate the capacity of USB drives. Steve is a meticulous developer and he always make sure his code is RIGHT.

I kept running into SpinRite 6's limitations and finally blew up at Steve:

Shortly after this, ValiDrive was released and Steve went back to working on SpinRite. Quickly, SpinRite 6.1 was pre-released.

I downloaded ValiDrive and ran it on a multi-adapter USB drive that I had bought from Amazon.

This was advertised at a 512GB USB drive with USB A, USB C, and Lightning connectors. I bought it to take on a trip but never used it. It came in a nice metal case lined with foam. It had neatly printed instructions and the support e-mail actually answered questions for me.

But it was too good to be true.

ValiDrive showed that it only had 64GB of capacity and was SLOW.

Then I ran it on 2 microSD cards that I had been using in my Wyze cameras.

They were true to size and much faster.

Then came a real test - the 64GB USB drive that I use for my KeePass vault.

Perfect.