I found myself agreeing with much of this article, but I have to say, I used SpinRite to great effect maybe 20 years ago on a drive that had the “click of death”.
I tried all kinds of methods of recovery, and nothing worked until I tried SpinRite. I can’t speak to how it did what it did (who knows, maybe it was a total fluke), but it gave me the opportunity to scrape all of my data off of it before buying a replacement drive.
Clock of death means HDD bootloader is unable to find service area and load actual firmware/setup data from the platters. The only software able to fix that will have a database of drive models and firmwares for reinitialization (PC-3000). Spinrite does none of that, its just an MFM formatting utility that grew to be a snake oil over the years.
I tried all kinds of methods of recovery, and nothing worked until I tried SpinRite. I can’t speak to how it did what it did (who knows, maybe it was a total fluke), but it gave me the opportunity to scrape all of my data off of it before buying a replacement drive.