hello everyone, i am from Johannesburg, thanks for attention to this post. I am ready to set up a dr lab for my new company and i have done research for almost one month until now. I have read so many forum posts, review articles and I found out one intersting thing: most places I have visited are putting pc3k, salvationdata and atola together, especially the former two. why? pc3k and salvationdata are one company?

and here in this hddguru forum, there're mainly two parties: pc3k fans and salvationdata fans, i see they're often quarrelling with each other, they're guarding towards their own tools and fighting against the other. I am just suspecting if they are one company and playing with us, the end users? two different tools but very similiar functions with different appreances? one with high price, the other with low prices? But finally whatever customers buy, the company wins, they not only creates brands but also twice profit. If this, how terrible will it be or it doesn't matter, we don't have other choices?

we often read a lot of news about some famous stars or companies, they sometimes create scandals, sometimes charities, sometimes stories, etc. But finally they are indeed famous and attract too much attention. I have so many questions with pc3k and salvationdata. Anyway, I still need to decide finally, just curious...

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Question yourself before decision

Dear Friend,
A very good advice, be carefull with Salvation Data "TOYS", when to buy you get the best attention,
as for support, you are completely IGNORED, you don´t even have firmware to use with these "TOYS",
you´ll have to "Dig" on the web for them, and "PAY" if you find.
I personnaly prefer the PC3K "PROFESSIONAL TOOLS", the kit comes with a 3GB firmware database,
it is also integrated with the Recovery utility software "Automatic".
I used both, and on scale 0 to 10, pc3k got 8 to 10, when Salvation Data Tools got ( -10 to 2),
as for the support, you´ll have to learn chinese... indeed, chinese products ALWAYS had the fame of
POOR or BAD quality, the technical support is iqual or worse...
my Regards

There are pros and cons of both companies.
Pros for ACE:
The tool is excellent and can assist if you know how to use it in most of your problems in recovery work and duplication. It is excellent in WD head problems I am not saying head alignment problems so do not mistake this one. There is a nice way of working with RAM and ROM in ACE tools. There is also easy ways to do other features also but you need to understand the tool and how it works and it does take a very long time to get to know this program. The manuals are good they could be improved. But most of them are well written and give good information for you to help you out in getting started on this one. You will have a download box that does come with some FW not a lot but there is some in there that you can use to get started with. You will get all update for one year and if you are lucky you can have TS from them too.
Cons for ACE:
Once your year is up the cost to keep up this tool is 900 euro for the year. You will have to pay this if you want the latest updates and need them for your drive repair. The TS Stinks for sure. Never ever email them you will wait forever for a replay from them. If you can get a hold of them on MSN you might get some help. Sometime Skype is better from what I understand but not sure on this one. Their forum is dead and not a lot of help on this one.

SD Pros:
They do give you free update for the life time of the tools. UMMMM I find the Maxtor tool is good for repairing this drive family. But it has not been looked at and updated in a very long time. Guess there is no need to do this one. There is case studies offered to help and assist you in some of your work. But you need to know when it is possible to use them and not destroy the data on your drive. The tools can be used to refurbish your drives with if you want to do this one too. They do offer TS with remote assistence by team viewer. Yes there is FW for this tool and it is now on their forum and you have to download it. There is also a person that uses SD tools who has made a Website for FW and you can find a lot of FW there that people upload and share on this Website. I have never seen anyone ask for pay on this one as of yet so I do not know this. Wait this one could be wrong there was a recent post that a new website came up that has FW on it and this company who is hosting this I think they are asking for you to pay to download from there. But they give you the chance to help them out and upload to them for free. Not such a good one to go there and get their FW from them.

SD Cons:
The programs can be buggy. Let me say that there is a lot of bugs in their program and they fix them only to have new ones. I have seen where one feature was working well and they fixed bugs in something else and now this is no longer working and is buggy. So you have to deal with a lot of program bugs and give bug reports all the time on this one. On the forum you have someone who is not good at reading English and will post we have supplied this suggestion to our Techincal department and will consider it. The manuals are terrible. You will need to write your own as I have done. You will need to use a lot of old drives you could care less about and practice with them to learn and understand the program and document your findings and make your own manuals on this one. There forum is not so active either and there is a lot of people who are confussed posting on it and wanting help. Now it is an open forum you will find a lot of post which are very bad and now people are not willing to help out as much due to this fact. You have to understand the one button solution and how and when to use it becasue if you do not you can destroy your drive. Not all one button solutions can fix and repair your drive. Right now the TS is over worked cause of all the problems and remote assistence they do to help out clients that you have to make an appointment to get this TS and arrange with your sales rep. SD is making new tools now and they are over worked on this one so you will wait a long time to get the original tools updated and the bugs fixed in them.

But the real problem in this one is not the tools. It is your understanding on how to use them. You knowledge on HDD repair, structure, and investment in time to learn how HDD work from the inside to the outside on this one. No tool can help you no mater how good it is unless you have the knowledge needed to use them and understand them. Just to open a DR shop on the fly and buy some tools does not mean you can do the work that is necessary in the end. You need to either team up with another shop in your area, go and work in a shop in your area, aquire and pay for a DR tech to come to your shop and work to teach you how to do this work. No answers here are for free and you will find out there is no spoon feeding on this one. You also pay for what you get.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Ditto! poehere tells the truth: both tools have their own advantages and disadvantages. If you want to make fast money, go for salvationdata, the tools pay themselves by several cases (within the first months, you can make best use of SalvationDATA engineers' remote assistance and recover your target data for free). If you have enough time and want to be real data recovery professor and teach in University or research some data recovery technogies, go for PC3k, it may take you half one year or longer to use the tools well, up to your experience and knowledge.

btw, NYtech1970, be careful, there're some professional guys professionally working for pc3k, atola or sd in this forum, they may say how bad sd is or pc3k is bullsh1t or atola is nothing. Actually if I suggest, you'd better find some local distributors or ask them to give you one end user who is using their tools and then you can watch the live demo by yourself. You can even try it by yourself! Seeing is believing!

Let me give you some tips to find out those guys who are our 'superheros' in this forum:

1, they usually have a lot of posts here;
2, they usually debase other tools;
3, in most topics, you can find them. Why? because they are paid to work here, see?

Well, in this world of competition, I can understand them, they need to earn a living. So do be careful about your decision!

Well done, again, poehere, you are real hero here!

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Never be young?
Never be a dream-maker?

Bullshit!

If what you say is true, why would people who work for SD, PC3000, Atola talk bad about their own product. In my opinion SD tools are produced more for people who wish to refurbish drives and less on data recovery. Read my previous posts if your interested in SD tools.



P.S.: Bullshit!

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

'thatdellguy', are u just struggling out of being drowned? "people who work for SD, PC3000, Atola talk", they are three different parties, not the same party, understand? like what NYtech1970 said 'they're fighting against each other'.

I really suspect if you have their tools or not and you have a large number of posts debasing others. Anyone who debases sd and I can almost find you there. how much pc3k paid you?

Well you actually did a good job here, if possible, I want to hire someone like you to do the same.

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Never be young?
Never be a dream-maker?

Bullshit!

Do you actually have a point to make with your empty posts? Your previous posts remind me of a newbie trying to break into the world of data recovery. You’re not even a member on the SD forum, I checked. Sit back, take a breath, and relax. Your aggressive posts remind me of Amarbir.

P.S.: Bullshit!

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

And again, except for phoere post, nothing was said here....

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http://www.pclab.com.pt facebook.com/PCLAB.A.T
ACELab partner

I don't understand what's the problem : it's not the tool but the man behind the tool or that handles the tool that make the difference.

Both SD and ACE have problems and both have good points. Both are only expensive toys if you don't know how to use them and if you don't have a decent technical background. Both are NOT REALLY NECESSARY if you can write your own tools. Technical support is good and can be a preferred add-on if present but it's not really necessary, at least for me.

We are talking about DR not drive refurbishing that is another world , totally apart.

The "easy money" concept is not appropriate, I think. If you are good enough, each tool can be paid in more or less time depending on case complexity and other factors (different charges are applied depending on different case. At least I do so) . Everything depend on your business model.

I have left any consideration about Atola because I haven't seen it yet in action.

And basically every one of your whopping 16 posts is about how great salvation products are. What should we infer from that?

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

As you can tell nytech. There are some issues to which tools are good..
poehere is the most neutral post with most facts. the rest of the posts are people pissed about other things thats happened years ago on this forums and now they dont trust anybody.. slowly becoming like the dead salvation data forums.
I own SD tools(and i stopped asking them for help because i ended up helping them more.... the irony of the situation)- they are good tools - to a point;; but i wish i had some of the other tools too like pc-3k. Besides the tools is a good workshop and mostly experience as you could have picked up from half or more of the posts and any forum you visit.

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It seems that the unluckiest people in the world are those that don't backup.
Free Solutions
Picasaweb- Pictures and movies | Dropbox - Documents and other..

In my experience it boils down to this (and yes I have owned and used both):

If you don't know what you're doing, neither tool will be useful.
If you do know what you're doing, you can limp along with salvation tools.
However, if you ever get the opportunity to use a PC3K you will never want to see your salvation tools again.

If you really know what you're doing you can make your own and sidestep the whole issue.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I am not trying to be aggressive to anyone, I myself is not dr engineer but I have engineers working for my company. Also our success rate is coming from our comprehensive data recovery solutions including all of the tools, I didn't mean it's from sd only.

What I can see is the result from my engineers who are using sd tools, ace tools and a bunch of software solutions. When I can see my tools creating profit for me, I didn't care if it's buggy or not, i see the result only, that's why I love everything useful to make money. maybe this is because I am not engineer and I don't feel the same as you guys.



yes, my posts are more on how good it is for sd and also I mentioned we use pc3k udma and flash most. sd and ace are our major solutions which help each other for high success rate, but you know i pay more to find one engineer to use ace tools and it takes longer time to use it well. In the first year, I need to spend around usd15000 more to the ace engineer than sd engineer. the result from these two tools is not a big difference actually. This is my cost, I surely care about it.

How about you, Drc? you always say how bad sd is and how good pc3k is? what's your purpose then?

well, I am sorry if I make some people feel unconfortable but I am a direct business man and I just hope to help those who wants to start dr business a little when you are running your business, I am not talking about dr tech only and i cannot.

Finally I hope everyone can succeed in dr business, whatever tools you are using, I just share my own experience and results, you don't need to follow.

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Never be young?
Never be a dream-maker?

Bullshit!

Thanks to all of you for your great suggestions and reviews, but I am really confused about which to go with. You defeat me!

Anyway thanks again and I will find if there're some local distributors of pc3k or sd in my city or other local cities and see for myself.

sigh...I am fooled by this world...

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Question yourself before decision

hddguru forum, pc3k dealers' heaven, enjoy yourself!

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Train yourself before you step into DR

It really doesn't make such a big difference that whether the stuff is coming from Rostov On Don or Chengdu. But the difference lies in WHERE they are being sent and who is about to use them.

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Bitlevel Data Recovery

No tool is a bad tool if you know how to use it and what you are doing. The basic problem in all of this is that people think if they buy these tools it is a one button push and my drive is repaired. This is not the case. You have to know and understand what is wrong with the drive in order to use the tools to help you fix the drive with.

Just becasue one company makes case studies these will not help you fix your drive if you read them and follow them. This case study was for this drive and it worked to repair the drive they did the case study on.

Becasue one LDR worked in one drive to fix it and start it does not mean it will work again in a drive you think is the same.

Most of all when you try to explain your problems here and you have no idea what is actually wrong with your drive in the first place. You have done a lot of reading on Internet. Now think is this myth or facts. Do you actually think that they are going to tell you the truth of how to fix your drive.

You follow people advice here on Internet to fix your drive you risk the chance of destroying it especially if the person has never fixed a drive and the only thing they know is electronic and problems with TVS.

If you want to know what is a good tool first learn how to understand a HDD. Learn the different problems and do some research on what is actually wrong with it. Do not relay on the tools to do this one for you. You will never get anywhere and you will never fix a drive and get back the data on it. You have to have a good understand of what is wrong with your drive first.

Like I said before ACE has it advantages in fixing your drive but you need to know how to use the tool. SD can fix other problems in drive if you know how to use the tool. You are the one who has to decide on which tool to use for what the problem is in your drive. Do not relay on them to do this one for you. You have to have a good knowledge of your problems in order to fix them.

In all fairness if you want a good tool them make your own like others in this field have done. Do not relay on ACE or SD to do it for your. Learn your drive, understand how it works, learn ATA commands, what adaptives are and how the drive works and how to repair it. Then you can repair your drives and get data off of them.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Hi NYtech1970,
There is one issue that does not appear to have been covered by any of the posters.

Thats is 'Forensic' credibility of the tools, depending on the 'business' you are in, even touching a drive can be a criminal offense if it is related to data recovery for forensics.

Then there are issues related to COC, and logging of tool use, just give SA a check as to the legal requirements first.

For example if you use a tool for recovery that has a poor record as regards bugs or poor support and you have to give evidence that is based on using such tools, you could very well find your ass in a sling once the prosecution/ defense starts examination.

Clearly define your areas of responsibility and how far you are prepared to go as a data recovery house.
Now you could say that my argument is irrelevant, BUT consider if you do a 'harmless' recovery on a device and during that recovery material related to Child pornography id found.
You could find yourself in the middle of something that requires proper record keeping, especially if the files "spread" to any local machines in your business, hell the guy could even claim the crap came off your machines.

Once you have done this, you will be in a better position to choose your tools.

Far too many tool vendors are Gung Ho in this area (and obviously a few recovery houses), there is quite a shocking admission of this in this very thread.

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 19

Code_slave, thanks a lot for your kind suggestions. But I am sorry to say I begin to feel sick of your posts!

I have read some of your posts recently, the following are originally from you:


"it may be wrong,argumentative, Trolling, insane, stupid or moronic."

"short sighted"

"downright blatant theft and plagiarism"

"ass in a sling"


Each time I read, I feel sick, since these words are created and belong to you, please take them back with you, never never set them free!


Please, please,Please, please,Please, please,Please, please,Please, please,Please, please,Please, please, I am crazy about it... nothing in your post, only those sick words...


if you really want to suggest something, please be serious, be reasonable...well, I am sick, I need to run....

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Question yourself before decision

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.