DeepSpar Imager

[vrocco]

Haven't seen anyone discuss this product.

Is anyone using it?
Does it work well?

Tell me your thoughts and findings on it.

[rchadwick]

I don't have it myself, but I suspect it's great. It seems the best tools are kept quiet

[vrocco]

Yeah I have not been able to find much on it except for the company's website. I have been looking for a hard drive imager. This one claims it will image a drive not recognized by bios and not able to be imaged by software methods.

The other product I am looking at is YEC's Ninja Forensic. The two products seem to be similar except for the price. DeepSpar's product is about $4000 and the YEC about $2000.

If anyone has thoughts or experiences with either product, I would appreciate hearing about it before I buy.

Thanks!

[cgallery]

How much faster will these tools work with drive with lots of bads? I use Media Tools/Copyr now, and it is slow, but it works.

I imagine the Deepspar is nice in that you don't have to repair firmware issues in order to image the drive, that it all happens automatically? That would be a nice change.

[jono-ats]

How well does it work? Let's just say I have more than one of them . . .

Hardware imaging is clearly superior to software imaging. MTP, for example, has limited functionality. The Deepspar Imager is much faster than MTP (it doesn't run drive hardware commands through the CPU's BIOS) and it is way more flexible. You can stop the DI at any time and pick up where you left off. It has three basic pass modes . . . fast, deeper, and data recovery ignoring ECC, so the actual data yields are much better than SW. These are infinitely variable, so you can tune the operation to a specific drive. I'd guess that the feature set of the DI is about 20X that of MTP and the other software tools I have used.

I'll have to give Andre and the gang a lot of credit for this device. It is very well thought out and brilliantly executed. I have put my software imaging tools away . . .

I haven't tried it much with drives that don't show in BIOS or have bad firmware problems.

Jon

[bnice]

I haven't tried it much with drives that don't show in BIOS or have bad firmware problems.

It would save countless hours of dr, if proved to worked.

[acforensics]

Jono,

I just bought one. I'm used to Data Extractor. How does it compare? I know you can't disable heads.

A

[jono-ats]

Jono,

I just bought one. I'm used to Data Extractor. How does it compare? I know you can't disable heads.

A

I think you'll figure it out soon after you start to use it.

I use DE when I have to disable heads, and DI when I don't. With DI there is a great deal more flexibility than DE.

A few other DI features:

1. Skip sectors based upon specific errors;
2. Clone and wipe drives;
3. Show the stream of binary data along with the sectors map, which is helpful in determining where you are on the drive without switching to a separate map;
4. The various parameters are extremely variable, so you can fine tune the recovery;
5. It's easier to go back over specific read errors to try alternate methods
6. Redundancy -- vs. with DI you have to tie up the PC3000 PC
7. An image map function is available, where you can see what's going on with the entire drive and exactly where various problems are located.
8. DI doesn't really use the CPU BIOS, so it's faster
9. You can do multiple passes and get the "easy" data first, which is important when you have limited time to work because of a failing drive

OTOH, DE seems to work better with some kinds of recoveries, but it may be that I may not have mastered fine tuning of DI. Also, DE is good when you have to keep the drive energized right after a firmware fix, and you don't want to interrupt the recovery process.

With DI, you have to fix the firmware problems first (just like DE) for optimum results. You could still image a drive with a bad translator if you wanted to, but you have to deal with the translator issue eventually.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it should give you a good idea.

Jon

[acforensics]

Thanks for the list Jono! This helps a lot. I'm excited to get it.

A