It analyzes their contents and can refresh the magnetic disk surfaces to allow them to operate more reliably. SpinRite tests the data surfaces of writeable magnetic disks, including IDE, SATA, and floppy disks. Gibson states that today, drive interleave is no longer an issue, but the data recovery features of the tool proved to be so useful that it evolved into the data recovery tool that it is today. SpinRite therefore gained its data recovery and testing capabilities as a side-effect of its original purpose. In changing the drive's interleave, SpinRite needed to be able to remap these physical defects into different logical sectors. At the time SpinRite was designed, hard drives often had a defect list printed on the nameplate, listing known bad sectors discovered at the factory. SpinRite was originally written as a hard drive interleave tool. SpinRite is run from a bootable medium (such as a CD, DVD or USB memory stick) on a PC-compatible computer, allowing it to scan a computer's hard drive and file system. Version 6.0, still current as of October 2019, was released in 2004. The first version was released in 1987 by Steve Gibson. SpinRite is a computer program for scanning magnetic data storage devices such as hard disks, recovering data from them and refreshing their surfaces. Included FreeDOS (doesn't use OS of host PC)runnable from DOSÄ .169 MB executable, 1.40 MB bootable disk image with FreeDOS OS