HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi all,

I know that there are alot of treads on the forum about the device (Flash Doctor of SD) and about SD in general.
I am looking for fresh opinons about Flash Doctor of SD.
By the prospect they have sent me it seems like it is few clicks recovery (after unsoldering the chip of course) and soon they will get over Sandisks chip flashes.

What do you think about the unit?
Worth the money?
In compersion to SC or Ace, SD's prices is the biggest winner of the competition.

The 1 million $ question is if there product are worth the money or not.

Regards,

At pressent point its not worth the money, go for SC if you want success..

Digisupport

Agree with digisupport

I use Soft Center and PC3000 flash. I tried out the Flash doctor one time only a few months ago.

Thats the first and last time I used it!

100% agree with digisupport and PCimage here

Is this the product you guys are recommending for flash recovery?
http://www.soft-center.ru/reader/

MrAndersons wrote:Is this the product you guys are recommending for flash recovery?
http://www.soft-center.ru/reader/

Price seems good for the hardware but don't forget the $1870 for the the software

http://www.soft-center.ru/fe?PHPSESSID= ... cqcfbjpq1/

Loki

Wow, of course it is...

ACE and SC's solution seem to indicate that they are fairly 'point-and-click' in terms of NAND recovery. You dump the contents of the chips, select the device it's from and if it's in their library it does all the work for you. From those who have these products is that how it plays out in theory? Sounds all too easy.

Speaking for ACE since i don't have SD.
If it's in the library, yes it works this way.
Otherwise there is the Global Solution Center. Otherwise, you have to work hard !

I bought SD tool exactly one year ago, while it was a very fresh and young product.

For some reason, I trusted SD's name and proceeded to the purchase.

Overall, after one year of dealing with it i have made these conclusions:

1. If the media you are trying to recover is already in their database, it can work with only a few clicks. For me, this was the truth for no more than 10% of the cases i had. By the way, they have adopted a "pointing system", with which you earn a point if you score an uploaded algorithm as succesful. You lose one point for every un-scored download you make. Judging by the fact that the library is pretty messed up (you have to make various tries to find out which id is the one similar to yours), this gets a bit frustrating.

2. If the media is NOT in the library, then you can ask for SD tech support to connect to your machine via TV and have a look. This is usually the case here; they connect to your machine within a few hours usually, but i have to say that I also had a couple of cases to which the SD staff failed -or forgot or were too busy- to connect to my machine for days. I had to send requests every morning hoping for someone to get back to me. And counting the time-difference fact, i had to wake up at 3 o clock in the morning (local time) and send support request (or go to the office straight from the pub, send the request and then get back to what I was doing ). 50% of the times the support staff connected to my machine, they succesfully recovered the chips. The other 50%, well... read the following.

3. In case you are able to fill the necessary bits yourself (determine ID etc) then you are in luck.

4. (and most important) About 20-25% of the cases have FAILED using this tool, either because the tool wasn't able to identify chip, or it couldn't succesfully read dump, or whatever. From these cases, 80% were succesfully recovered using my partners' Soft Center.

Having said that, if i was to buy a tool today, i'd go for Soft Center or ACE. I don't know about ACE tool, but my partner who uses SC's, is very happy with it.

Northwind, many thanks for providing valuable feedback.

There's far too many posts in this forum simply stating "tool x is crap", or "tool y is the best". While these statements might indeed be true, it adds so much more value when the poster elaborates on the tool's strenghts or weaknesses.

While it is a nice offer from SD to let their techies help out by remote controlling your workstation, it shouldn't function as a workaround for SD delivering tools with bad quality or missing abilities.

So far I have been up on the fence concerning flash/SSD recovery tools. But inquiries from clients about this area seems to be growing. Mostly flash from cameras though. It seems flash pens is mostly used for transporting data (got copies elsewhere), and SSDs are still rare to see.

Eleg,

True, cases where flash pens contain valueable data without copy elsewhere are quite rare, i think less than 20%. And in these cases, most people are not willing to pay the required cost for the recovery.
Most people come to us with digital memory cards with pictures from their newborn baby or from their vacations in Vancouver (nice!).
On the other hand, if you want to provide complete flash recovery services, you have to be able to recover all these sweeties.

Have a nice day