HDD GURU FORUMS

Hello Everyone,

I would like to quickly introduce our new product Atola Bandura. It is a high-speed 1:1 multi-pass SATA disk duplicator that can image hard drives with bad sectors. It reads most of the data as quickly as possible on the first pass, then reads the rest. As a bonus, it can also automatically diagnose, wipe and compare drives.

It is so easy to use that we even had a trouble shooting a video of an imaging session
Have a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3wM0U9-3qI (it is a 40-second video)

Bandura specs
Bandura vs other imagers

Screenshots: Duplication, Wiping, Diagnostics, Comparison.

That's an interesting name

The touchscreen it's a great tweak.
Very good.

Doomer wrote:That's an interesting name

Yep, Ukrainian name

Dear Dmitry,
How does the Bandura compare to the Atola Imager on hard drives with a severe amount of bad sectors? I know it cannot image by selective heads, but can it image with diifferent settings for severe bad sectors?

Alan

how much? where can i buy it? does it recovery all file systems?

your going to get some nice tools for your money here
and for sure take on other imagers on the market

going to order one soon looks good

http://atola.com/products/bandura/pricing.html


http://atola.com/wheretobuy

Alan2:
When it comes to lots of bad sectors, Bandura will do almost as good as the Atola Imager. Bandura offers different presets like in Imager, however, in Bandura you cannot change settings for each pass (i.e., it has predefined values for timeouts and how many sectors to skip on error). We will add the ability to change pass settings in future firmware releases.

Firmware upgrades are free for Bandura.

gabak:
Please see links posted by craig6928.

I'm interested in the tool, can you wipe two drives at the same time?

HDD Spaz
Not at this time, however, we plan to add this feature later this year. By the way, updates are free for life for Bandura.

Thank you, I might be placing an order shortly. Can you tell us what further features you plan to add? Image by heads would be nice

Using it strictly as an imager for good drives, does it have or plan to have a "smart copy" feature where only the data gets copied? Currently I'm using a Ninja for good drives and a DDI for damaged ones. It would be nice to have one tool with similar features of both.

Edit: I guess it would have helped if I read the webpage more in depth. I see that it in fact can copy just sectors with user data. However, can you elaborate a little on this? Is this NTFS only?

mattbrad2,
yes, it has a "smart copy" imaging mode called "Sectors with data". Currently Bandura duplication supports only NTFS filesystem structure. Partitions of other types (FAT, EXT, HFS, etc.) are imaged from their very first sectors till the end. It's helpful to know that "unpartitioned" disk space is not copied in "Sectors with Data" imaging mode.

We are going to add support of other filesystems in future. FAT is the first of them that is planned to be added at the moment. I suppose Bandura firmware update with FAT support will be released this fall. By the way, any future Bandura firmware update will be free for lifetime.

Regarding "Ninja for good drives" and "DDI for damaged ones" I can tell that Bandura handles damaged drives confidently using efficient and reliable imaging algorithms inherited from Atola Insight (though without imaging-by-head). Good drives are copied very quickly. I saw real speed of 130 MB/s for a pair of quick HDDs.

Hi, Read-long function not included because obsolete?

I dont know what Atola has on schedule or will add on features in future
for the Bandura tool.

But somehow I dont understand why the lowest priced tool of this
company has to include features of the higher priced tools.... ?

Would be a kind of competing the own production range. I wouldnt do it.
The other option would be - to offer a higher priced version with more
features included....

One will see
+++

@falther

The introductory price makes the Bandura a very attractive proposition, but after the intorductory offer expires, it's full price is not far off from the full imager that they currently offer (which is a downgraded Insight). Of course people are curious as to what will be developed further for this product.. I think this product may eventually end up being a direct replacement for imager currently offered, the company will then have dedicated tools marketed in their own right.

I'm looking to place an order soon for one of these, as the questions I have already had answered lead me to think that this tool wil be extensivly developed futher.

@Dimitry,

I see the Bandura supports MD5, SHA, i need a good portable imager for forensic drive acquisitions. Does the imager currently support any write blocking to the source drive?

I just found it on the specs "Source HDD write protection". I think this should cover it.
@Dimitry, @Vitaliy, any comments on using this device as a forensic imager?

How about imaging to file, DD image type or something like that?

quasimodo
We do not have much experience with forensics. We know that certain features are used for forensics and so we have added those features. Right now we are collecting the first real usage feedback and will be adjusting the tool (that is why we have introductory pricing).

Right now Bandura only supports imaging to another (target) disk. No image file support for now.

5 Banduras