lcoughey wrote:
CK wrote:
Hi Luke,
I agree with your findings, I haven't had much time to compile mine like the way you have.
What I miss most with Atola is the ability to jump x number of sectors. I find that DDI has far more control over the drive.
Also, if you pause the imaging process, it automatically turns off the destination drive - I find this very annoying.
Bear in mind that Atola is quite new on the scene and improvements are being made to it all the time (head map/selective head imaging). With the right feedback and suggestions, it will improve.
Excellent points, I forgot to add the jump feature and comment on the power off issue. I also noticed yesterday afternoon when playing with a drive with a lot of media damage at the 60% mark that all the Atola Imager does is narrows in on those sectors, but other than a longer read timeout, it doesn't (can't) manipulate how the drive reads those sectors. It would be nice to drop down to PIO mode or tell the drive to read the sectors, ignoring ECC. Instead, it just reports a UNC error, gives up and moves on.
Don't get me wrong, in most cases, missing a few thousand sectors is fine. However, when it comes to a client's Quickbooks database, every sector is critical. I think that Atola certainly has potential, but I'm not sure that it is ready to consider itself a true competitor to DeepSpar on the imaging front.
Realistically speaking, I'm not sure what the hardware is needed for. Under the hood, it is just a standard system board booting into Linux. At the very least, give external access to the KVM and let the user work with the unit directly instead of having to use another system to connect to it via ethernet.
I may have got the wrong angle here (being the eternal newbie and all
but atola does jump. You can select from different imaging paths, our create your own. Basically you set how many sectors to jump, and the timeout before jump. On bad discs I normally use one of the defaults and then after the 4 th or 5th imaging pass (5 are standard) I will create my own, maybe in reverse, and then hit "Resume" effectively targeting the non-readable sectors in the first imaging passes. You can also export the error list, although I have not seen/worked out how to import it again.
In the last 12 months I have seen radical improvements, and as an early adopter (believer ??!!) I have received the updates. I can bet in 12 months more the gap to DDI will be closing.
I have no commercial relation to atola, i am just a customer.