Atola Insight - Current User Thoughts

[kpeddie]

Well, after looking around for a number of months at various options i have finally ordered an Atola Insight. Given what its supposed to do i suppose its not a bad price but would llike to get some opinions to those of you that have been using it for a bit. Hoping it will be useful for obviously imaging but fixing the odd firmware issue that we come across as well as 'hopefully' making quick and correct diagnostics on drives attached, saving us a bit of time.

Been recovering data from logically damaged drives for years and have our own solutions for drives with some physical damage(bad sectors TVS etc) but hopefully this will allow for things like pcb swaps and loading of adaptives etc?

Thanks for any words of wisdom.

[sknopp]

I purchased the USB version of AI almost a year ago and have been generally pleased with my results. A few miscellaneous comments:

-The USB version has an issue that prevents it from powering up *SOME* Western Digital drives. The workaround is to power the drive from a separate power source, but you then lose the ability of the AI to do hard resets when imaging.

-The GUI is easy to understand and navigate and the ability to change imaging parameters on the fly is nice.

-The automatic diagnostics are not 100% accurate, but generally pretty good.

-Updates are fairly frequent.

-Customer support is very good.

Shawn

[Dmitry Postrigan]

I would like to add some input about power issues with those WDs.

The problem is that they need much higher start-up current (more than 3 A!) than specified in the specs, and therefore short circuit protection kicks in. A simple workaround would be adding a shottky diode (or a low-resistance resistor) to the 12V power line.

This does not happen on Ethernet units. It will also not happen on the next generation of USB units.

[kpeddie]

unit only arrived today so not had much time to play with it as yet. Did notice however that after stopping and then attempting to resume an imaging session of a WD drive, it decided that it no longer had a headmap and i had to run the diagnostics on the drive again for it to entertain the possibility of imaging from just 3 of the heads.

This new generation of USB units, will they be USB3.0 or even better, eSATA? and if so when can we expect that. I suspect im going to get tired of imaging over USB2.0 pretty quickly so will be in the market for ethernet unit or updated usb unit pretty soon once my current unit has proven itself.

However so far quite impressed. DiskSense unit itself is robust and doesnt feel like it will break in a hurry, cables and converters are solid and cant say anything bad about the distributors. Once i got hold of them they shipped it very quickly and infact it took twice as long to get through customs as it did to get from California to the UK.

[craig6928]

we have a Atola Insight imager unit

have to say it built very nice and has some nice features built in that helps us out all the time.
well worth the money.
but as we have to pay for updates that sucks a bit


it did fail in a recovery of a hard drive by just recovering the folders name and not the contains
which where jpegs

where another data tools recovered everything needed.
hit and miss

[FedirN]

Did notice however that after stopping and then attempting to resume an imaging session of a WD drive, it decided that it no longer had a headmap and i had to run the diagnostics on the drive again for it to entertain the possibility of imaging from just 3 of the heads.

It seems to be a bug somewhere as heads map setting should persists over stop/resume. We were unable to reproduce this behavior in our lab; could you please tell more about how this happens? Is this something which happens all the time for the current HDD?

Thank you!

Last edited by FedirN on March 10th, 2011, 14:39, edited 1 time in total.

[FedirN]

it did fail in a recovery of a hard drive by just recovering the folders name and not the contains
which where jpegs

When this happens, were you working with the original HDD or with the copy?

Thank you!

[craig6928]

hello i was using the original HDD that i had to recover

where the atola imager failed

the other hardware recovery did the recovery 100% with all the jpegs in the folder

where the imager just recovered the folder names and nothing in them

[FedirN]

hello i was using the original HDD that i had to recover
where the atola imager failed
the other hardware recovery did the recovery 100% with all the jpegs in the folder
where the imager just recovered the folder names and nothing in them

I guess you are talking about recovering files from unstable HDD using Atola Insight (not Imager), am I right? If so then it may happen.

File Recovery is currently optimized to work with a copy of a drive. It means that file recovery will not re-read bad sectors and has little options to deal with very unstable drives. I recommend to copy the drive and to recover files from the copy because you'll have much more data out of very unstable drives.

We are working hard on improving File Recovery and we will integrate it more deeply with Imaging so that you'll be able to recover file from badly damaged drives, including the case you mentioned in the nearest releases.