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Old post I know, but I figured why not put in my 2c. Those who are pros probably already know most of this, but for those who are 'just getting in to it', or are not sure:
Salvation Data, where to start.. Pros consider this system a joke, but all the same you might as well justify your opinion. As for me, want to know if I own them? Well I use the same name in the SD forums as here if you want to check. DC, HDD, and HDPE.
First, Pros, by tool:
HD Doctor Series:
the manual has gotten eons better over the last year or so, from something absolutely useless and often times dangerously difficult to understand, to semi-edited pieces of text that can yield an answer.
their system usually does firmware dumps well, dumping info to files and uploading on WD, maxtor, seagate and hitachi directly via the boards
Support of drives is pretty universal, for features they do have
Allows some limited troubleshooting to diagnose a problem without opening the drive or doing further electrical analysis, depending on the problem
a few semi-useful to highly useful features - spin-up / spin-down motor, etc..
DC
better than straight DDRescue in some circumstances, such as when the drive requires being reset repeatedly; also, graphical...
Allows soft, hard and full power reset. Also, dedicated power supply.
Simple support for turning off sector reallocation (done with same ATA cmd as hdparm, so its just as unsuccessful on most drives)
allows alternate boot modes on hitachi and WD royl drives
What if I've already slowly imaged the file table of the ntfs partition (which had many sectors that had to be read back and forth, ultra-slow to put together) and now I want to extract 200 files from a directory that are probably fine and have no bad sectors, only.. without imaging the whole drive? Shadowdisk means this information doesn't get reread. Not a bad feature, and surprisingly actually works most of the time
allows imaging just the used data on ntfs partitions (but not hfs strangely, which it just selects the entire partition for)
Cons
HD Doctor
these are really just one device, the four devices feel like a scam to get you to feel like you're getting more than you are. There is zero technical reason why you need four different items and four different programs here.
many features, sadly done better by linux / opensource / available tools
interface looks like components were quickly dropped onto the canvas and sat there. No explanation or warnings on features that can easily kill a drive.
Constant, obvious sloppy code - programs are not multi-threaded and will freeze while any command is executed. very little effort put in to doing more than 'getting it working', feels like that's where they stopped. For instance, seagate 7200.11 busy issue, which requires little more than entering a few commands to the serial interface, has a button which says basically 'read manual'. Manual's instructions are missing several key items which do not completely solve the issue on many drives
spelling mistakes in the program and issues abound in the manuals
useful features are often hampered by either being hidden away or not fully functional; features present in one device are not in others - the power guage, for instance, is a nice way of seeing if the board is drawing too much power.. but it's only present in one program - why?
DC
painful, because DC could be really really useful but often fails due to sloppy sloppy coding. Iterate a file tree, right click, and there's a create html output. Great! I can send that to the customer! Except, it doesn't properly iterate the files and folders, only the single folder I've selected at that time.. so I'll get what, one folder at a time? useless.
potentially dangerous - turns on the drive as soon as you hook it up. the program will also sometimes randomly start a drive you've turned off..
file extraction - intensive, extensive extraction are my only options.. great. What does that mean guys? how about getting to choose how many sectors it copies in a go, instead of these abstract terms?
If overvolting the board (they say pre-amp, but I'm assuming they just step up the voltage on the 5v line) actually yields results, why can we only activate this if we also activate shadowdisk? I haven't even tried it, because it sounds incredibly foolish, like something that is asking to make a hard drive into a smoking Christmas tree.. maybe one day I'll try it on a test drive for fun.
statistics? what statistics? doesn't take any stats while copying an image, so when you try and get an idea of how much is copied, you have to stop the process, right click, and get the task stats.. and wait 10 minutes as the program has frozen while it loops through and counts every block it finished..
ntfs it reads the volume bitmap to allow you to image just the file data, except it will of course freeze if there's a bad sector in the bitmap entry. Also, HFS+ has a volume bitmap as well guys, how come when I try and image an HFS partition it just selects the entire partition, including blank space? I guess it's at least a positive that they support HFS to begin with..
HD HPE
notice how this one isn't even in the pros section?
the platter exchangers feel flimsy as heck, I wouldn't trust them to do a swap with.
the gloves + mask that come with it are cheap cheap fabric, and just for fun I took apart a junk drive with them on to see.. sure enough, little fabric bits pill off the gloves onto the platter! do not bring within 10 ft. of clean room!
In conclusion - is it worth the money? HD HPE no. HD Doctor and DC have uses, and with a little more polish from the SD camp, they will be worth what everyone paid for them. I would suggest extreme amounts of knowledge in the field to begin with, and the take away here is that you're buying a cheap hammer. In the right hands this hammer could probably build a house.. just don't expect the people who usually build houses to have it in their toolbox.
Also, Angel and the support staff are quite nice people, and to their credit are very responsive.
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