How long time a DR company takes to clone a HD 1.5 TB using a software or hardware based imager? The HD is 99% full and with a lot of bad sectors.

its really hard to tell.
sometime a day, or weeks or may be more.
totally depends on the surface condition.

I remember recently we image 70% of a 1TB hard drive in 6-8 hours and remaining 30% took 3 days.

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A few months to a few hours.

Also depends on the hardware tool being used.
I find DDI4 is best for handling bad sectors, but thats just my opinion.

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I found sometimes PC3K better than DDI4 and vice versa, and obviously still can not decide or point out in which case to use what

True.

I guess it depends how damaged the drive is.
PC3K is also great for handling bad sectors. We find that DDI is a bit kinder to drives after a head swap / bad sectors. Heads tend to last a bit longer on the DDI maybe it's just our luck.

I'm not putting PC3K down at all its also our main workhorse

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he time it takes has been explained in the prior posts. Non damaged would clone way under 10 hours. Each time a bad sector is found the operator will have preset the cloning system to jump way forward trying to find good areas. Each time it hits a bad sector it might take up to a couple of seconds to time out- again as defined by the operator. If too many jumps in a row then the operator may have set the drive to reboot (so 10 tries at 2 seconds each) - such as 10 bad-repower. That operation is about 30 seconds. Once through the drive once then the jump sized reduce and retry times might go up. How long it takes depends on how much damage, how its spread over media, and most of all- how are the heads doing. That is a shortened example why the answer is not all that easy to predict.

Healthy drive: 100MB/second (about 4 hours), 55MB/second (about 7.5 hours)
Unhealthy drive: 20MB/second (about 20 hours), 5MB/second (about 3.5 days)
Really unhealthy drive: 1MB/second (about 17 days), 50kB/second (about 347 days)

So, I guess the answer is somewhere between 4 hours and 1 year, based on the information you provided. Of course, that is assuming that the drive is stable enough to run around the clock. It should also be noted, that this is based on the first pass. Extra time will be needed to attempt to clean up bad sectors, which may take as long or longer to go through because the lab is now only dealing with bad areas of the drive.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery