Great to see a Atola Insight forum

[quasimodo]

Great to see an Atola Insight forum Sir Dimitry

Maybe you casn share some more information for the forum users about the product.
Some more details which are not on the Atola website or blog.

[quasimodo]

Like for instance:

Automatic diagnostic of all hard drive components. What level of diagnostics can this feature provide?

[Dmitry Postrigan]

I am including an actual diagnostics log of a good hard drive.

Atola Insight Diagnostics.rtf

(98.87 KiB) Downloaded 1606 times

[Doomer]

Deja vu

[Creator]

Hm...Log from drive looks like information for lammers
"Head stack looks fine" is it 100% guarateed?
Sometimes you can't identify is it problem of HS or PCB.
More interesting to see log from damaged drive, for example with incompatible NV-Ram on donor. Anybody can show this log?

[crecomp]

Hi
Any idea if the next update will have a fix for the seagate drives forfirmware issues?
Also any idea when the next update is due ?
The auto diagnostic function is this a very accurate assessment of a drive or should beused as a guide.

I would like to know of propose experiences with this

Thankyou for the new section for atola

[Russwinters]

My experiences have shown the Automatic diagnostics to be very accurate. The only time I have seen it give some odd explanations is with failing spindle, but obviously 99% of the time it is easy to tell if there is a failing spindle without any device to help you. So it is not a large issue.


I will locate a drive with corrupted/wrong nvram and show the log; Be back later with this.

[Dmitry Postrigan]

Creator, I guess you will be surprised to know that this kind of log saves a lot of time even for a pro.

[scratchy]

Hey Dmitry,

I've been looking at the Atola for a while now and havent seen any bad reports.. I will probably wait for Version 2 (May 2009) before purchasing, but could you PM me any details..

Thank you,

<itch>

[Dmitry Postrigan]

scratchy,

What kind of details are you interested in? Please feel free to ask any questions, it does not have to go through PM.

[guru]

The cost and does it floor map (defect scan add to P-List) the hard drives back to "Factory" standards?

I'm not worried about the auto button thingy.. I just want a nice easy tool for my engineers to use without being able to rip my software off.. IYKWIM

[Dmitry Postrigan]

Hi guru,

I am not sure if I fully understand your question... If you can provide some more details on what that function is supposed to do, then I will find out about it.

[guru]

1: Heads Tests
2: Defect Scan (ADD ALL FOUND DEFECTS TO RELEVANT FACTORY LISTS aka P-LIST)
2a: Defect Scan SA area and add defects into relevant lists
3: SMART Value Reset
4: And of course module read/write inc flash , loader creation (boot code/buffer code)
5: Head Depop (cut off head)
6: SelfTest would be good also (not S>M>A>R>T selftest)

[Dmitry Postrigan]

Thanks, I got it.

1: At this time this is achieved via LBA scan. Here's an example (click to enlarge):

There's also automatic diagnostics that uses LBA scan to watch for timings. It will let you know if there's an issue with any head.

We will add functionality to test heads with vendor-specific commands at a later date (at this time this is a low-priority task, mainly because no one requested such feature).

2: Atola Insight does not have means to add defects to defect lists at this time (since this is more for hard drive repair, not for data recovery). Generally, at this time we do not plan adding features for hard drive repair, but only those that help people recover data. This may change in future, once we finish developing most data recovery features.

3: Please see 2)

4. Of course, you can read/write firmware modules as well as EEPROM and NVRAM: http://atola.com/products/insight/firmware-recovery
Loaders can also be created and used.

5: Please see 2)

6: Please see 2)

[guru]

Ok well when you support option 2 I will buy some :O)

Sure its a good product not quite what I am looking for