Good data recovery tool for a good price

[Galdorf]

From what i gather it skips bad sectors entirely though very low level drive commands the speed at which it can image a drive with lots of errors makes this apparent also listening to the drive during the imaging i have never heard do any retries.
Only useful if a drive has a few bad sectors though not anywhere near what ddi can do .

"Safe data recovery
Read defective media in SafeRescue mode

When copying from media with defective areas these areas will be skipped in the first run. The rescue operation will be performed at the end of the process to prevent further disk damage."

my guess :hdclone<--------------------------------> IDE/SATA controller <---> Hard disk
prob works at lowest level possible in the bootable cd version looks to be part c++ and assembly running in a linux environment. like mhdd.
Just a guess, it is the fastest software drive imaging software i have ever used more features than acronis for the price.

 

[P-List]

From what i gather it skips bad sectors entirely though very low level drive commands the speed at which it can image a drive with lots of errors makes this apparent also listening to the drive during the imaging i have never heard do any retries.
Only useful if a drive has a few bad sectors though not anywhere near what ddi can do .

"Safe data recovery
Read defective media in SafeRescue mode

When copying from media with defective areas these areas will be skipped in the first run. The rescue operation will be performed at the end of the process to prevent further disk damage."

my guess :hdclone<--------------------------------> IDE/SATA controller <---> Hard disk
prob works at lowest level possible in the bootable cd version looks to be part c++ and assembly running in a linux environment. like mhdd.
Just a guess, it is the fastest software drive imaging software i have ever used more features than acronis for the price.

It is not possible to skip bad sectors entirely with any tool, hardware or software. Hard drives can not work like that and there aren't any low level commands that exist that would allow you to do this. All tools send the same read commands to the drive. If the read command falls on a bad sector, then the only way to reduce the harm is by quickly sending a hardware reset command, which software tools like these can not send. It is impossible to predict where the bad sectors are ahead of reading them, since their location is random for the most part.

From everything that I see on their website, it works a lot like ddrescue. It will quickly do the first pass, aggressively skipping everything that is hard to read. By skipping, it means it will jump over sections of the drive without even trying to read them after it runs into the first problems, or in other words, after it hits some bad sectors and lets the drive fully process them. If the skipping algorithm is aggressive enough, it will work through the first pass relatively quickly. This does nothing to handle any read instabilities of the drive and it still allows the drive to hammer its bads, but it does delay the majority of the damaging recovery processes until the end, as the vendor says. This is the best you can expect from a software tool, but there are lots of limitations to this and it certainly still hammers the drive. Everything that I've said about ddrescue in this post would apply here as well, since it's the same kind of process with the same strengths and weaknesses: https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/cant-afford-deepspar-disk-imager.66816/page-2#post-526511

 

[DataMedics]

Any Window based software is limited in it's access to low level drive functions by the Windows Host Controller that actually interfaces between the software and drive. As for software tools, ddrescue is the best there is because it can actually modify block read sizes (something that can't be done in Win).

@OP, perhaps you might consider MRT as an option (http://en.mrtlab.com/) It's only $3.000 which is less than most. It's a pretty good imaging tool and has some of the functionality of PC-3000 such as being able to read/write ROM codes from PCBs. Basic firmware repairs like WD slow responding and reading/writing modules, etc. Certainly not as advanced as PC-3000, but can still handle a good percentage of cases in the right hands.

Avoid Atola, it's an overpriced joke and no one in data recovery takes them seriously. That's why they're moving into "forensics" instead of data recovery now.

 

[Vlad P]

Hello everyone.

We recently launched our RapidSpar demo program. If you do occasional software data recoveries, this program is a great opportunity to test RapidSpar in your business and see if this could be the right fit.

All details are here:
https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/rapidspar-demo-program.68924/