In changing the drive's interleave, SpinRite needed to be able to remap these physical defects into different logical sectors.

Drive interleave has long ceased to be an issue, but SpinRite continued to be developed, now using its remapping as a data recovery tool.

It analyzes their contents and can refresh the magnetic disk surfaces or flash memory storage to allow them to operate more reliably.

Gibson says he designed SpinRite to fix sector problems, not failures of circuit boards, motors, or other mechanical parts.

This, in turn, allows dynamic head repositioning, whereby, when reading a faulty sector, the reading head is deliberately moved backwards and forwards many times, by varying amounts, in the hope that each time it returns to the sector, it may come to rest in a slightly different position.

By performing statistical analysis on the succession of results thus obtained, SpinRite is, according to its maker, often able to "reconstruct" data from damaged sectors, and even in those cases in which complete reconstruction proves impossible, SpinRite is able to extract all intact bits from a partially unreadable, and write them back, or copy them to a new block, thereby minimizing the amount of data lost.

Version 6 offers full access to the entire disk surface regardless of partitioning, Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.)

Version 5 was limited to AT Attachment (PATA, IDE) hard drives; version 6 may, on suitable motherboards, work on newer Serial ATA (SATA) and USB hard drives, and with any other type of drive—SCSI, 1394/FireWire—that can be made visible to MS-DOS through the addition of controller BIOS or add-on DOS drivers.

[15] As of June 2022[update], SpinRite version 6.0 continued to be current, unable to function with systems that utilize EFI bios, with unchanged price.

Some users have reported that Spinrite has problems with very large drives, and that using, say, MS-DOS boot disk created from Windows 95 or 98 (which refers to itself as MS-DOS version 7, which is otherwise not sold separately), Spinrite will test the entire drive without software error; other users report that this did not resolve the Division Overflow error.

[20] Some public reviewers doubt SpinRite's ability to "refresh" aging drives, and "recovery" of sectors marked as "damaged" is considered by some to be undesirable and counter-productive.