I was doing some research and noticed (probably old news for some) there is a new "Rebuild Assist" feature in "Serial ATA Revision 3.2" which is intended to improve RAID rebuilds when a drive fails, but could also be beneficial for us in data recovery.
Although the "Serial ATA Revision 3.2" document is not published freely by Serial ATA International Organization, there is some interesting information around the place:
http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfile ... covery.pdf"...Upon this command, the drive will eliminate any unnecessary background activity, determine if it contains any unusable heads, write-protect the media, and enter a special mode that includes limiting error recovery to the free retries. This mode will stay active until the drive is power-cycled..."
"...As a contributing member to leading industry standards bodies, Seagate has submitted an open-standards proposal of the RAID Rebuild™ functionality under the name Rebuild Assist to the T103 (SAS Proposal: 11-298) and SATA-IO4 (SATA Proposal: SATA31_TPR_D144) committees for inclusion in their published standards specification..."
http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/te ... Rev1.0.pdf"...The Rebuild Assist mode provides a method for a host controlling the rebuild process to determine that logical sectors on the failed device are unreadable without having to read every LBA to determine the unreadable logical sectors (i.e., the read command is terminated with an error and the failed LBA is reported in the sense data)..."
I wonder if we will start to see hardware imagers supporting this feature.