firmware patch to speed up imaging (WD BEVT 220A0RT0)

[professor_jonny]

am I able to patch a hdd's firmware somehow to speed up the imaging process by disabling read retrys and bad block mapping etc...?

I have been patiently waiting 9 days to image a hdd with ddrescue at an average rate of 650kbps on a 500gig hdd.

but now it is no doing a second pass and it has to do 25gig of skipped bad areas to retry and has a rate around 1000bps.

At that rate it will take for ever, and after that it will trim and then split sectors.

It is a WD BEVT 220A0RT0

is there a ttl command to enable time limited error recovery or something ?

[professor_jonny]

i have looked at the wdr tool but where do i find it i just come back to som chineese people that want you to pay via western union.

would there happen to be a download as the other one is in russian.

[professor_jonny]

Thanks for the link I can confirm I'm now imaging at 25 Mb/s second now up from 600 Kb/s.

I had problems because of the acronis true image messing with the interface drivers but after removing it it worked perfectly.