Thats right, PC-3000 uses two IDE slots to connect IDE drives or adapters for other drives. As I can see from MHDD manual, it can do only basic things and it is not designed to fix service area modules or perform their diagnostics.
Manual says we can only see SMART, read write sectors from surface and set/ remove passwords and change some drive's settings (HPA, noise parameters
LBA48 etc). its not possible to interact directly to drive's service area with this product.



Did not found any descriptions for this in MHDD Manual. If you've got one, please show it to me. mhdd - its a tool to light data recovery cases.



Its rather difficult to compare two products since they are not equal and they are created for different types customers. You are right, it takes years before your hard drive researches start working for you.

lol. I am sure folks from SalvationData have plenty of time and good brains, however, they are 'little' far from ACE. And it is not just a man working, rather a team of professionals.
About ATA commands, there is a source, but will take you a looooong time to understand it and interpret it, then make it work for data recovery purposes.
As for ACE hardware, 90% of it is piracy protection, 10%, as others said is for software controll over power, and some other features, such as reading with patching, send different types of commands and resets, execute some of the scripts on a hardware level, etc.
I disagree that it takes just time and good brain to develop a tool, such as PC3K. You need a team of professionals in hard drive industry and electronic engineering, who are willing to spend years on research to develop a similar tool, which, most likely no one will buy, as in Russia paychecks are diffirent from most of the countries, and the cost of the tool developed in richer countries will exceed the cost of PC3K toolkit, and I doubt will have more features than PC3K

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