What to buy as startup: DDI or PC3K?

[GhostPart]

One kind opinion request, for all the professionals out there:

supposing you start over with a new small shop and your budget allows you to buy only one of the two in subject

For starting up with DR without clean room operations,
as professional interface tool,
what would you suggest to buy first?
and why?
Thank you

If you have additional interfaces to suggest, thank you

Andrew

[freakzy]

I don't quite understand about what you need : You need a cloning tool only, or you need firmware operation only, or you need both ?

Psiclone is cloning hardware mostly used in forensics, but for data recovery DDI is a lot better for this purpose. These two does not have any "firmware operation" features.

Atola gives "automatic diagnostic" and possible automatic firmware fix for all major brands in one package, and yes, Atola gives possibility to do sector per sector cloning, with other additional possibilities : head map, etc, etc

PC 3000 probably known as one of the most used tool in this industry, but not without difficulties to master its operation. Its Data Extractor UDMA combined with PC 3000 utility is powerful to deal with disk which have instability of firmware reading (e.g : firmware is fixed but unstable enough after power on/off) so you can gain access to data as soon as possible.

Salvation, with their HD Doctor gives you the possiblity to choose separately which brands are the most you encountered in DR. This gives a good reason for saving money. But also, not without difficulties to understand all the operations.

[lcoughey]

It really depends on what you want to do and how much work you have. I'd say start with DDI and get a good lab partner to work with. When you the volume of outsources projects are high enough to cover the cost, then buy PC3000.

[GhostPart]

Thank you freakzy and lcoughey and thank you to all the pollers

You answers are both useful and complementary.

When I asked this question I supposed that not many PROs would have answer, this is really a strange behavior, yes, because I don't ask how to dive in their use

Cases amount is raised among these last two years, and so I'd like to keep some additional cases in my laboratory instead than forwarding always to third party DR companies. Some cases in Seagate and WD "sounds" like firmware issues, sometime they are, sometime they are not. Some time they are drives with many bad sectors, so really unusable and needed to be cloned.

Reading about PC3K, I understand that provides some advanced cloning features. This sounds that in average (bad firmware drives and drives to be cloned), it would be smarter to buy the PC3K or do I miss something?

I'm fighting against this point: DDI provides cloning only, PC3K firware and cloning (maybe not sophisticated like DDI): don't this sounds like PC3K could provide more recoveries than DDI (meant without opening the drive)?

Thank you for your replies and sorry for this delayed one

Andrew

[Nick_CT]

PC3K will allow you to image, resolve firmware problems, perform logical recovery and resolve other issues that nothing else can.

DDI is purely a hardware imager. It's a great one, but it's an imager and doesn't provide the other functionality that PC3K does, hence the price difference.

I started with a PC3K and got a DDI a year later, I think most people do it the other way around.