@hddguy
I agree with you, but I'm always a little bit skeptical about those same companies, which avoid me to think about buying such kind of interfaces previously I was thinking about PC-3000 SCSI.
Ok, things may go wrong, and they did to a couple of companies who we have recovered their SANs. But as you read, we have recovered them.
Anyway, let's read.
Things may go wrong and they can loose a second drive before the first one is replaced (in a degraded raid, obviously)
Things may go even worst: their 1th level backup maybe failed too
Things may go even much more worst: their 2nd level backup (tapes) may be unreadable
ok that had happen, yes!, you may believe it or not and we saved their ass(es)
The point is another: averagely an company that has the budget to buy and hold an SAN or an BIG server, usually
- has a cluster
(nowadays also the micro businesses may have a private cluster and private cloud for less than 4000$ see here
http://www.fastec.eu/clusterbiz/)
and or
- has a DR (disaster recovery plan)
so it is only in a crazy scenario (ok, it has happen and it can also repeats) but it would be an exception in the exception that an "environment" where SAS drives are present that an incident would not be super-prevented
In other words, buying an optimum device as SAS imager or PC-3000 SCSI would also mean "hope" that an super business customer's company would be so silly that forget to think about drives failure.
Here we say (sorry it is a
popular saying) "who lives hoping, dies defecating"
Adding up, usually (and this decreases the justify of any SCSI SAS recovery tool investment amount):
do all of us remember how does it work and RAID 5 or (even worst/better) an RAID 6?
The above silly business company, will be able to loose its storage if one drive fails? Yes, again it may happen, they can be so silly to use spare drives that will rebuild automatically in an RAID with too elderly drives, while we all know, that before an rebuild in presence of elderly drives, a full backup is a must,
it may happen but again we would add up hope to hope
and last but FIRST, as said above, you do need a double (RAID 5) or triple (RAID 6) drive failure to find yourself in that situation that would avoid an RAID reconstruction and RAID data recovery.
last but not least google SERPs (indexing/SEO): are you in the first 5 positions? Which turns in to:
Will that failed (silly) business customer just call you? which is translated in the following simple consideration
buy and SCSI/SAS device for some xx.000$ and the hoping+hoping+hoping+hoping that cases will generate and call exactly you...
if you do your business in this way... you may hurt yourself so much.
That is why on one hand, such devices are expensive because of the fact you will not produce/sell so many, but on the other hand, watching which kind of "situation" they shall recover, it is more a fact of "bet" than a business plan, and so, IMPO they should be much more a "bundle" like
dear appreciated and valuable customer, if you buy our main device, you can buy this additional one for an reasonable amount
which would turn that business other way around, many requests, many devices, lower production cost, increased business also for the main device they sell which would lead in an extremely increased overall business (ok, both Acelab and DeepSpar may hire me for Business Development Consultancy AHAHAHAHAH)
Ciao!
Cor
P.S. we have recovered one really bad situation in the above mentioned craziness: one HP server' RAID 5 with Citrix XenServer had failed brutally, we had recovered the 4th SAS drive out of 5 (no need of the devices, as happen too much times

) and reconstructed the RAID but the situation was damaged twice
- slight RAID damages
- the consultants of that customer, during the first misadventure (there has been a double disk failure), have had the time to reinstall the Citrix system wiping out (and blowing off) the filesystem on which Citrix relies and deposits the VDIs (virtual disk images)
as final result, the only thing that was present on the RAID volume was a brand new fresh install of a Citrix XenServer and the rest a RAW device space
- no answer from any kind of LVM command, total disruption
we did it!
which turns us into an
Citrix Data Recovery specialized company + into an
LVM2 Data Recovery company