Advise: Building a Highend Data Recovery PC

MobileGeeks

MobileGeeks

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Hi Guys,

Im currently looking into building a data recovery PC for our in house repair shop.

We currently get alot of home/small business SATA 1/2/3 and the rare IDE harddrives that are on the brink of failure.


The problem we are facing using a normal desktop PC is the time its taking to scan the drives (sometimes days) using various recovery software.

What hardware setup would you recommend? to achive the fastest result.

Do you guys image the dying HDD and then scan from a different drive?

Do you use highend raid cards? or arrays?

Again.. Im after the fastest soultion possible.


Thanks,

Marcus
 
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Hey, this is just one of those processes that takes time to do right. The speed more comes down to the hd health. Any decent processor, with the fastest ram you can fine should be fine for this. We actually use an old custom build we built about 10 years ago. P4 3.2 ht, with 2gb tam running 7.
 
Ain't much about the speed of the computer...for recovering drives. Our "bench rig" that we use is an old Pentium 4 H/T 2.8. An old Pentium 3 or even Pentium 2 probably woulnd't be a bottleneck.
If you use the computer for running AV scans....yeah the CPU and RAM help.
 
I believe the hardware specs are largely irrelevant as the HD interface itself is the bottleneck, as others have alluded.

I've heard that Linux is more tolerant of faulty hardware than Windows, so you may want to consider loading some version of Linux onto your dedicated recovery box.

Otherwise, you'd obviously want to have at least one or two 2TB+ drives in there to store all the data you recover.
 
MobileGeeks said:
Im currently looking into building a data recovery PC for our in house repair shop.

We currently get alot of home/small business SATA 1/2/3 and the rare IDE harddrives that are on the brink of failure.

The problem we are facing using a normal desktop PC is the time its taking to scan the drives (sometimes days) using various recovery software.

What hardware setup would you recommend? to achive the fastest result.

Do you guys image the dying HDD and then scan from a different drive?

Do you use highend raid cards? or arrays?

Again.. Im after the fastest soultion possible.
Click to expand...

compnet said:
No I put failing drives through days of scans without imaging.. sometimes I chkdsk and defrag first to speed up the scans.. If that doesn't work the old freezer trick gets me out of some sticky situations.

Other times, I just throw the drive at a brick wall while its still spinning down and tell the customer I tried my best, but you'll never get those pictures of your dead grandma back.
Click to expand...

Nice trolling, as usual compnet...Wouldn't expect any different from you or even as much as a helpful contribution here or there.

Reported.

To the OP. if you really think the speed of the machine is going to make a big difference when dealing with bad drives and actually need to ask if working off an image is an alternative, you really need to stop working on paying customers drives. I cringe to think about the damage that has been done already after you spending days torquing on these drives for people who may have thought you had any idea of what you were doing.
 
anonymous Mac Tech said:
Double post by accident.
Click to expand...

How do you do it?



x2 if the hard drive is dead/dying, that will be your bottleneck.

I use a 4.8ghz intel i7 w/ 32gb of memory w/ a ton of external drive bays, both for laptop and desktop sized drives. scythe makes great bays that lets you plug in drives without screwing all sorts of containers to them first.

Thats just me though.


Currently I'm building two new bench stations utilizing two of these: http://usa.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/P8Z77_WS/#specifications


I also hate to wait...for anything.
 
We use an old athlon x2 box with 4GB of ram, a USB 3 card, esata card, and a bunch of various adapters. We only do software-based recovery in house. At the first hint of hardware failure, we stop and give the customer 3 options. Send it out for clean room recovery, sign a second release and have us carry on with the knowledge the drive may get borked beyond recovery, or take the drive back and just pay the analysis. The bottleneck is really just the drives and adapters. I don't see any way a good experienced tech is going to see any noticeable difference between our old box and a gaming rig when it comes to data recovery.
 
drjones said:
I've heard that Linux is more tolerant of faulty hardware than Windows, so you may want to consider loading some version of Linux onto your dedicated recovery box.
Click to expand...

Why "load?" If the computer that has the "somewhat defective" drive inside is still usable, then boot to a live Linux distro(bution) CD/DVD and pull the data over to another external (or internal) device. I do this quite a bit when I make data backups for clients.

Linux is pretty good at allowing you to get around protected / passworded Windows files. It is also mighty good at allowing you to pull data from a nearly dead / defective hard drive.

Generally I don't run chkdsk or defrag on a failing drive as I have seen times when after doing so has caused the drive to become unreadable.

I too, don't like to wait. But I have many other things which I can be working on while these processes complete.

compnet: Other times, I just throw the drive at a brick wall while its still spinning down and tell the customer I tried my best, but you'll never get those pictures of your dead grandma back.
Click to expand...

Really? I don't think I'd ever admit this to anyone - ever! (even here in these forums!)
 
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angry_geek said:
We use an old athlon x2 box with 4GB of ram, a USB 3 card, esata card, and a bunch of various adapters. We only do software-based recovery in house. At the first hint of hardware failure, we stop and give the customer 3 options. Send it out for clean room recovery, sign a second release and have us carry on with the knowledge the drive may get borked beyond recovery, or take the drive back and just pay the analysis. The bottleneck is really just the drives and adapters. I don't see any way a good experienced tech is going to see any noticeable difference between our old box and a gaming rig when it comes to data recovery.
Click to expand...

Good policy. We use a 2.0GHz dual processor PowerMac G5, a single Processor PowerMac G5, and a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 duo iMac. All machines have internal 1TB drives and all are at 2GB of RAM. The two G5 towers both have a spare SATA drive bay which depending on the situation comes in useful, but mostly for parking the destination drive for creating a clone. The target drives I keep out of any kind of inclosure to utilize plenty of airflow (even running desk fans directly on the target drives whether they are running hot or not). I like utilizing firewire over usb when I can because firewire runs independent of the processor for consistency and reliability of the bench rigs. But different interfaces work differently in any failing drive situation.

Biggest thing is good quality UPS setups on each rig as these machines can be running around the clock building clones.
 
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anonymous Mac Tech said:
Nice trolling, as usual compnet...Wouldn't expect any different from you or even as much as a helpful contribution here or there.

Reported.

To the OP. if you really think the speed of the machine is going to make a big difference when dealing with bad drives and actually need to ask if working off an image is an alternative, you really need to stop working on paying customers drives. I cringe to think about the damage that has been done already after you spending days torquing on these drives for people who may have thought you had any idea of what you were doing.
Click to expand...

I'll ignore your personal attacks.. only one person besides you has ever given me negative rep and that was for pointing out that someones question could be answered with Google.. I have more positive than negative rep, but apparently this site has some broken system that gives people like you and xander more weight than the rest of the world..15 helpful posts.. ya no contribution here..

Anyway I've had experiences getting drives after pizza techs and have seen failing drives run into the ground to the point drivesavers couldn't recover in a clean room.. I hope one day recovery is regulated and people who don't know what they are doing end up in jail for being greedy and careless.. I mean a simple Google search and every how to on data recovery says image the drive first..
 
I recommend the OS on a SSD drive and then the storage that you extract the data to on a RAID 5 array. Must have a hardware RAID tho so buy a card. Make sure the computer has USB 3, eSATA, or better yet an internal dock for hard drives. My old job had a backup mule that had internal hotswap docks so all the drives were plugged in via SATA 6 g/s.
 
I just left a clients where one of the HDs in his system is making a very loud, distinct clicking sound, then it just shuts itself off.

Clearly a physical failure of some sort.

Is it possible to recover data from a drive like this without shipping it out?

I'm getting ready to overnight it to a data recovery firm, would be nice to do it myself, just not sure what software you'd use that would overcome a physical failure like that.....
 
drjones said:
I just left a clients where one of the HDs in his system is making a very loud, distinct clicking sound, then it just shuts itself off.

Clearly a physical failure of some sort.

Is it possible to recover data from a drive like this without shipping it out?

I'm getting ready to overnight it to a data recovery firm, would be nice to do it myself, just not sure what software you'd use that would overcome a physical failure like that.....
Click to expand...

No ........ .................
 
drjones said:
I just left a clients where one of the HDs in his system is making a very loud, distinct clicking sound, then it just shuts itself off.

Clearly a physical failure of some sort.

Is it possible to recover data from a drive like this without shipping it out?

I'm getting ready to overnight it to a data recovery firm, would be nice to do it myself, just not sure what software you'd use that would overcome a physical failure like that.....
Click to expand...

What is the model number on the hard drive's label?
 
MobileGeeks said:
Hi Guys,

Im currently looking into building a data recovery PC for our in house repair shop.

We currently get alot of home/small business SATA 1/2/3 and the rare IDE harddrives that are on the brink of failure.


The problem we are facing using a normal desktop PC is the time its taking to scan the drives (sometimes days) using various recovery software.

What hardware setup would you recommend? to achive the fastest result.

Do you guys image the dying HDD and then scan from a different drive?

Do you use highend raid cards? or arrays?

Again.. Im after the fastest soultion possible.


Thanks,

Marcus
Click to expand...

Without a doubt, the fastest solution is a Deepspar Disk Imager, which has been mentioned several times on this forum before (www.deepspar.com). We have 6 of these and think they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Although we have no experience in using them, you may also want to at least check out the Atola Imager (http://atola.com/products/imager/). And if you're after a free solution: ddrescue (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html).

*Note: it's not about the computer you're using, it's about the tool used to access the sectors on the drive (and none of the tools I mentioned use Windows as an "interpreter" to speak to the drive).

Hope this helps!
Brian
 
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300DDR said:
Without a doubt, the fastest solution is a Deepspar Disk Imager, which has been mentioned several times on this forum before (www.deepspar.com). We have 6 of these and think they are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Although we have no experience in using them, you may also want to at least check out the Atola Imager (http://atola.com/products/imager/). And if you're after a free solution: ddrescue (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html).

*Note: it's not about the computer you're using, it's about the tool used to access the sectors on the drive (and none of the tools I mentioned use Windows as an "interpreter" to speak to the drive).

Hope this helps!
Brian
Click to expand...

How much does that deepspar cost? I could not find a price on there.
 
These days if I can't recover the data with simple tools, I just drop it off at 300ddr (I drive by it several times a day)

they do it fast and safely, and by the time i have restored the clients computer to working order I make close to what I would make by spending the time doing it myself, and I don't worry about screwing it up.

More and more I am focusing on what I do best and sub out for services to people with more resources or experience.
 
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