DDI to support 2TB+ soon

[loki]

Just had this reply from Andrei:

The B-release should become available next week.
There are some other less important things... I will post more details when the DDI is released.
The support for drives over 2TB is quite a major update. It will require firmware update of DDI units (in addition to copying DDI.exe file.)

[Tawfeek]

very good news

[pclab]

A great update for a great tool.

Looking forward for it.

[mr_spokk]

Nice to hear, hopefully some support of headmap features aswell...thinking of Samsung and older Seagate's.

[loki]

Nice to hear, hopefully some support of headmap features aswell...thinking of Samsung and older Seagate's.

DDI already supports imaging via head maps

[pcimage]

Nice to hear, hopefully some support of headmap features aswell...thinking of Samsung and older Seagate's.

DDI already supports imaging via head maps

Not for Samsung it doesn't!!

[Agent]

Not on Samsungs. But it does work on older Seagates, just via Terminal and slowly. We use PC3000 DE for Samsung drives with bad head(s)

Edit: Beat me to it.

[loki]

Not on Samsungs. But it does work on older Seagates, just via Terminal and slowly. We use PC3000 DE for Samsung drives with bad head(s)

Edit: Beat me to it.

Found out yesterday on the deepspar forum that the DDI supports headmaps of newer seagate drives without using terminal / coms connection.

[Agent]

Yep, and it's quicker.

[pcimage]

Yep, and it's quicker.

Yep, loads quicker!

[loki]

Beta released


We have just released a Beta version of DDI/DRE. You can download ‘DDI3 v3.400.exe’ and ‘DRE v4.00.msi’ files from our ftp server.

As always, we don’t recommend using this B-release on your customer’s drives right away, but rather test it first on drives you have in your lab, e.g. previous jobs, parts drives, etc.

As soon as all critical issues are identified and fixed, we will release the final version of these applications.

The major new feature of this release is a support of drives larger than 2TB. So both products, DDI and DRE now do not have any limitations as far as drive/partition size is concerned (GPT is now also supported). Don’t forget that you can use a dedicated configuration drive (a third drive connected to the DDI system) in case you have to image the largest drive available on the market.

The DRE has improvements in processing NTFS, FAT32 and HFS+ partitions and many new features, such as reviewing only Unprocessed, Unreadable or Corrupted sectors in map for selected files/folders or viewing metadata of selected file(s), e.g. its MFT record. You will also find other introduced functionality.

The drive identification algorithm was improved. The DDI should now better recognize drives with various kinds of instabilities.

The heads map support for some newer Seagate and Fujitsu drives was added. Because some drives of many vendors have “transitional architectures” (while the vendor is moving from one firmware architecture to another) we found that in some cases it is quite difficult to automatically identify a particular heads mapping algorithm implemented by such drives. Therefore we decided to give ability to User selecting various versions of the algorithm. So, if you happen to get a drive that fails to build a correct heads map try to execute DDI using ‘h’ option, e.g. ‘ddi -h0’, ‘ddi -h1’ or ‘ddi -h2’, where an index instruct the DDI to use a different version of the heads mapping algorithm for each vendor.

The DDI-DRE network protocol has been improved. The DDI is now more persistent to the NIC driver issues (known as Network Error 12.)

There were also number of improvements and bug fixes added to this release that were discussed earlier in this forum.

ATTENTION: This release of DDI.exe requires a firmware update of the DDI unit. You can find more information about the firmware update procedure in “DDI3 Firmware Update” folder on the ftp. The update application requires ‘setup.ini’ file that can be requested by email sent to info@deepspar.com providing a serial number of your DDI unit(s).