Product review:
Salvation Data HPE SP Platter exchanger

Importance

A platter transplant is the greatest fear of many data recovery technicians. There is no margin for any error when performing these procedures; everything must go perfectly. Things that must be taken into account are: Alignment, washers, spacers, number of platters. Until this point there has been only one commercial tool available from HDRC for performing these procedures on 4 Platter drives. Newer drives have “spacers” that impede all current tools from working at all. This new HPE SP is meant to remedy that.

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Value

The tool will pay for itself in one successful job. These are among the toughest procedures to do in all of data recovery, so companies price accordingly. Their price may be intimidating at first, but once you complete your first platter transplant and receive payment you will understand where the value lies.

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Reliability

While I can’t say these tools are designed to last forever, I can say that you should get at least 500 uses out of it before it begins to lose its reliability. When you do the math you realize that buying one of these for every 500 jobs doesn’t seem so bad.

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Usability

Using the tool is fairly straightforward. It slips on the out rim of the platters, and you tighten the screws to grip the platters. Once you have done this you remove the spindle cap and transfer the platters. The general operation of the tool is simple.

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Performance

This is where the good ends. The tool performs well on select drives. In my testing I have found that it doesn’t work on any of the drives that I need it to. The nature of the defect is that the tabs that are meant to go in between the platters and the HDA casing, but the grip for the platters is too thick to fit between most of the 4 platter drives with spacers that the tool is supposed to remedy. I am not sure how this design flaw was overlooked. If you are working with old 4 platter Maxtor’s you are in luck and this tool will work wonders. However, if you need to work with 4 platter 7200.11 Seagate’s….good luck.

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Overall

I can’t say that I am overly impressed with the tool. While all of the other aspects are wonderful, the glaring design flaw is too great to overlook. The tool was designed to allow us to easily work with 4 platter drives with spacers, but all of the 4 platter drives with spacers have thin clearance between the platters and the HAD rendering this tool useless. It is like buying a TV with no inputs - sure it turns on, but if you can’t do anything with it the product is pointless.

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Informative Article:
Repairing HDD firmware - Basics

HDD Firmware issues are becoming less common overall, but are still extremely severe, destructive, and difficult to repair when they do occur. The general flow of firmware repair is simple:

Step 1: Find the corruption.
Using tools to access the firmware area of the drive, you must first locate the module(s) that have been damaged or corrupted.

Step 2: Fix the corruption.
Fix the corruption. Either repair the damage or corrupted modules or replace them with a new working module that is compatible. Some modules cannot be simply replaced as they may have crucial information that is specific to that one drive. Some modules are like a “fingerprint” and are irreplaceable - no one module is exactly the same.

While there are some freeware utilities around for some specific older model firmware repair, generally you will need one of these commercial tools to gain access to the firmware area of an HDD:

• Atola Insight
• PC-3000
• Salvation Data: HD Doctor

Some drives; such as Seagate drives, have the ability to connect via a “terminal connection” using a modified RS232 cable. You can then issue the vendor specific commands to the drive to repair the firmware. This is extremely difficult and not recommend for beginners. If you want to learn how to efficiently use Seagate vendor commands I recommend you pick up a lot of Seagate drives that are expendable because you will kill many in your attempt to master this process.

Industry News:
Western Digital turns two…..terabytes.

With Solid State disks beginning to flood the market, HDD manufacturers are looking to keep their products competitive by greatly increasing storage capacities. Seagate released their 1.5TB drives some months ago, but now WD has one-upped them with their new 2TB “green power” drive. Not only does this drive have the largest storage capacity ever seen, but it has relatively low power consumption thanks to the technology used in their GP line.

Here are the basic specs for the drive.

• Capacity: 2.0TB (2000GB)
• Spindle speed: between 5400 and 7200 RPM
• Cache: 32MB
• Host interface: SATA (3Gbps)
• Read/write speeds: 90.4MB/s average read, 85.8MB/s average write
• Acoustics: 25dB – 29dB
• Power consumption: 10W at startup, 4W idle, 7W read/write, 1W standby/sleep

In most of the tests I have seen the drive performance isn’t “stellar” but it is certainly no slouch. The primary goal of this drive is to provide maximum storage space with high energy efficiency. If you are looking for speed, pick up a WD Velociraptor or a SSD instead.

The Drive is priced at around $299 USD and is available now.

Upcoming Event: Data Recovery Training

The next Data Recovery Training will be held on June 18-19, 2009. The small class size enables participants to ask questions of our HDD Doctor (the lecturer).

For more infomation, download Data Recovery Training Brochure.