I am a happy user of DeepSpar USB Stabilizer and to me it offers added value. I have no further interest in 'defending' the tool, other than telling you it helps me. I think HDDSuperclone is a cool tool, but not for me.
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So basically Windows is too stupid to handle errors gracefully, and the stabilizer keeps it out of the picture by lying to it?
Yes.
Or you could argue that it's not too far fetched for an OS to expect healthy hardware. And an intact file system. I mean, where do you want to draw the line? It's a design choice I guess, to wait x time on error, to try to mount a file system by default etc.. Perhaps Windows could handle bad sectors in meta data (I think this is what is the core cause of freezing) more gracefully and rather than lock up simply quit trying and pop up a message telling there's a problem with a device which prevents Windows from working with it. But even then USB Stabilizer would have value.
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In any case, there was a discussion in another forum which turned up an interesting titbit, namely that Windows uses a single timeout value for all disk I/O (in the registry), including spin up.
I am not so sure this covers all disk IO. This says it affects SCSI Miniport driver:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... rt-drivers. TBH I don't know what would be affected by that.
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I wonder what would happen if this timeout were reduced to its minimum value, ie 1 second. The default is 60 seconds (= 0x3C). Other people referred to an error recovery timeout of 600ms or 500ms, but no-one was able to back it up with references.
I am convinced I read this 600 ms value somewhere too, but I must admit I haven't been able to find where I read (or heard, I think it was a video) this.
But even if so, 1 second or 5 seconds is still very coarse and long. And then there's retires Windows may do which can also be intercepted by the Stabilizer. Is one second a reasonable time out on a severely degraded drive? Or for a USB flash drive? And again, even you could limit to 1 second, it still will do retries. USB Stabilizer allows you to prevent those. And do resets, power cycles.
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This begs the question, why do Ace and others choose Windows as their platform?
You'd have to ask them. Maybe it was better or less of an issue with previous versions, I have no idea. Maybe because many projects started on an attic or in a garage and it happened to be developed for Windows, by accident. And maybe not all things aren't decided on all that rationally. Who knows. Even relatively young products are developed for Windows while they could have opted for Linux. Would VNR be a better VNR and more successful VNR if it ran in Linux?
Anyway, since most tools run in Windows it makes perfect sense DeepSpar designs a tool to handle unstable drives in that Windows environment.
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Joep -
http://www.disktuna.com - video & photo repair & recovery service