to MS-DOS through the addition of controller BIOS or add-on DOS drivers. In May 2013 Steve Gibson announced the start of work on Spinrite 6.1 and 7. Issues Solid state drives Spinrite can be run and can be effective on SSDs, but running in a higher-level mode than 1 or 2 is detrimental, as it wears the SSD by writing to it unnecessarily. In episode #387 of the podcast Security Now! Gibson said "Run Level 2 because Level 1 is not permitted to fix anything" "The difference is both Level 1 and 2 are read-only, and that's the key. You don't want to run Level 4" In episode 194 of the podcast Security Now! Gibson said that he could "see absolutely no possible benefit to running SpinRite on a solid-state drive" and later "SpinRite is all about mechanics and magnetics, neither of which exist, by design, in an SSD". In episode 338 Gibson clarified "it is actually detrimental because [solid-state drives] don't like to be written", but also pointing out that a read-only run could be beneficial: "SpinRite's Level 1 is a read-only scan, and doing that on an SSD makes a lot of sense. Do a read-only scan of an SSD, it'll show the SSD's controller that it's got a problem reading a sector, and then it'll map that out or rewrite it in order to strengthen that sector, if possible. So that ends up being a value for SpinRite on solid-state drives." Also, Gibson responded to a question on his website that "SpinRite works on thumb drives and on all other solid state drives". S.M.A.R.T. on SATA drives While SATA drives are supported, SATA controllers that include a processor and diagnostic software can limit SpinRite's ability to obtain and display S.M.A.R.T. data ("thin controller" SATA controllers do not have this limitation). This data monitor does not affect SpinRite's recovery and diagnostics ability; S.M.A.R.T. data when available helps long-term disk maintenance and failure prediction. GRC said in 2006 that this issue would be resolved in version 6.1, anticipated to be a free-of-charge upgrade for SpinRite 6.0 users. , SpinRite version 6.0 continued to be current, unable to function with systems that utilize EFI bios, with unchanged price. Large drives In certain cases, Spinrite can only analyze somewhere between the first 128 gigabytes and 1024 gigabytes of a drive depending on whether the drive has 512 bytes per sector or