Thinking about buying a Deepspar

[othersteve]

All right, got my DeepSpar unit in yesterday and set it to work on a badly damaged Samsung 250 GB. Already I've recovered over 90% of the data, and though I'll never get 100% of this particular drive, I'm currently working toward 95% on a second pass.

This thing is amazing, every bit as much as everyone says. I bought the network add-on also and am currently sitting at my in-laws' 2 hours away remotely controlling its operations. I can reset the drive, adjust parameters, inspect recovered files, search for filesystems, and much, much more. It's simply amazing.

The biggest disappointment initially for me was how long it still takes to process really bad drives. This particular drive, without some voluntary skipping, would take many months to complete. And it's unlikely much of the really bad areas are even readable, too. The reason why is that it requires a power cycle after almost every single read in the badly-damaged areas. It may in fact be a bad read head, but I can't image by heads on Samsung drives (the one limitation in that regard), so I don't know for sure.

But boy is it awesome. The time and stress this thing is likely to save me is sure to be enormous. Anyone got any questions?