RapidSpar Demo Program

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DeepSpar Data Recovery Systems
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Hello Technibble Members!

We are happy to announce that we are now accepting applications for RapidSpar’s demo program.

RapidSpar is the first data recovery device designed for IT generalists, rather than data recovery or law enforcement professionals. It’s a ~$2,000US tool that can recover about half of the cases that software tools struggle with. We’ve previously written a detailed post on the results that its users can expect to see: https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/cant-afford-deepspar-disk-imager.66816/page-2#post-526511

You can see how it works in this demo video:

This demo program is essentially an opportunity to use a RapidSpar for 1 week, so that you can determine if it’s a good fit for your business. We are looking for any Technibble members from Canada or USA who find themselves regularly doing data recovery using software tools. Participation in the demo program is free, but we do ask for two things in return:

1) After using it for 1 week, ship your demo unit to the next Technibble member in line. In most cases this will be domestic shipping, but some users will have to ship internationally to US or Canada.

2) Post your honest feedback based on your experience using RapidSpar to your favorite social media website (for example Twitter or Facebook). If you don’t use social media, we will ask you for a testimonial instead.

We are allocating 4 RapidSpar units to this program and we will work with up to 20 Technibble members for now, so we expect this to take roughly 8 weeks. We will ship demo units to the first 4 members in 1-2 weeks.

You can apply by filling out this page: http://rapidspar.com/demo.html

We will later update this post with the user names of all participating members. Thank you for your interest!
 
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I've got some troublesome SSD drives in at the moment which seem to be firmware borked. Can randomly access after power cycling - then after a few mins of access it will disappear again. I'm in the UK but very much interested in rapidspar. Any thoughts about a uk demo? We are itching to buy one :p
 
:( What about those in little old New Zealand?

Any thoughts about a uk demo?

Unfortunately everything becomes much more complicated as soon as we go outside of Canada/USA. For most countries it'd cost hundreds of dollars in duties/taxes just to receive the device, then there are the high overseas shipping costs, long transit times, and additional costs in brokerage for us to get it back. This is already a costly program for us and this would push it over the top :(. We do all our development and manufacturing here in Canada, so it's all tax-free under NAFTA as long as we stick to Canada and USA, which is why it's limited to these two countries.

Thank you to all the applicants! About half of the available spots are still remaining.
 
I did apply online yesterday and I would like to thank the people at DeepSpar for giving us the possibility of demoing one of these units.
 
You are welcome!

I just wanted to give a heads up that we will be shipping out the first 4 units on Monday. There are 8/20 spots still remaining in case anyone wants to join in.
 
You are welcome!

I just wanted to give a heads up that we will be shipping out the first 4 units on Monday. There are 8/20 spots still remaining in case anyone wants to join in.
Is there anyway to let us know when to expect the device? Have you contacted the qualified people to let them know to expect the device? I'm just curious if we are going to be able to demo the unit as we haven't heard anything after applying.
 
Today we are shipping demo units to:

Slaters Kustum Machines
Ken's PC Repair
MyTG
Hampden Comp

They are expected to arrive in 1-3 business days. Someone will email a tracking number and activation information shortly. Please feel free to contact us (support@deepspar.com, or 613-225-6771) if you run into any questions.

There are 5/20 spots left. When we fill up completely, we will post up a timing schedule to show who is getting demo units and when. We have not done so already because we are hoping to have a mix of different people (in terms of the number of drives tested, the tools currently used, country, and current IT experience) with every set of four, so we'd need to have all 20 to sort everyone appropriately.

We have not offered demo programs in approximately 9 years, so we are excited to see how it goes!

One important note regarding testing - most companies have a box with bad drives that have accumulated over the years. Typically these are drives that could not be recovered with software tools and their owners never bothered to get them back. These may seem like absolutely perfect drives for testing data recovery tools, however that is not the case. The recovery rate of such cases will not even be in the same ballpark as real cases that just walked in the door. The act of trying to recover the data with software tools causes substantial harm to the drive; it pushes the problem away from simple read instability problems and toward complete mechanical failure, which can only be fixed by a professional in a clean air environment. If you have a case you tried to recover with software tools for hours and it didn't work out then the drive's condition is nowhere near what it was when you first received it. You should absolutely still test these cases, but please keep in mind that it's not a valid comparison vs software, since a significant percentage of these drives will be pre-killed by the software recovery attempts.

I spoke to one of the applicants last week and he said he'd love to test RapidSpar on a box of drives that he unsuccessfully tried to recover for days with ddrescue and spinrite. After days of attempts with these tools, most of the drives in that box have certainly developed a serious mechanical failure and no data recovery tool will be able to read them without repairs anymore. Hearing about tests like this as a vendor of data recovery equipment is quite unsettling. It's like if we sold clean rooms and our customers were testing them by walking in right after being in a major storm (dripping wet, mud on shoes, etc.) and then concluding that the clean room doesn't work because it didn't keep them clean.
 
I was curious to sign up and test it out, but held off on the thought that perhaps other Technibblers would be able to assess the equipment better.

Just signed up for the trial and am interested to give this a go. I do have that "box of bad drives" to test out, but will put the priority on any drives that may come in for recovery.
 
I was curious to sign up and test it out, but held off on the thought that perhaps other Technibblers would be able to assess the equipment better.

Just signed up for the trial and am interested to give this a go. I do have that "box of bad drives" to test out, but will put the priority on any drives that may come in for recovery.
I received my unit today and it is working great. I am recovering data on a drive the ddrescue was having trouble with. The source hard drive is corrupted with many bad sectors, but the RapidSpar is slowly copying data that I could not access previously. It is copying data very slowly and sometimes disconnecting, but it is slowly recovering data. So far I like what I see with the RapidSpar.
 
I received my unit today and it is working great. I am recovering data on a drive the ddrescue was having trouble with. The source hard drive is corrupted with many bad sectors, but the RapidSpar is slowly copying data that I could not access previously. It is copying data very slowly and sometimes disconnecting, but it is slowly recovering data. So far I like what I see with the RapidSpar.

I have no doubt this thing will "work a treat"! Can't wait to give it a go.
 
We received ours yesterday too but are having trouble with it. I have contacted support and apparently Dell USB controllers have trouble seeing the RapidSpar device. They are aware of this and are working on it. Once I plugged ours into an HP desktop it was recognized immediately. Also you have to use USB 3.0. I will see about getting a USB 3.0 PCI card locally as that is supposed to work as well.
 
We are indeed having trouble with Dells :(. The RapidSpar device is quite unique; it presents itself as a mass storage device to the PC, but it’s really a computer by itself and it’s doing a whole lot more. The USB3 controller on Dells is extremely sensitive/inflexible and basically just cuts the whole connection as soon as it sees anything it doesn’t expect.

To our best knowledge it should work on all desktop computers, and almost all laptops that are not Dells. A couple of weeks ago we went to four local computer stores, plugged RapidSpar into 150-200 different computers, and only Dells had these issues. We bought a Dell and we are working on it, but the USB controller they use behaves very differently from all other USB controllers, and it's proving difficult to work with.
 
I spoke to one of the applicants last week and he said he'd love to test RapidSpar on a box of drives that he unsuccessfully tried to recover for days with ddrescue and spinrite. After days of attempts with these tools, most of the drives in that box have certainly developed a serious mechanical failure and no data recovery tool will be able to read them without repairs anymore. Hearing about tests like this as a vendor of data recovery equipment is quite unsettling. It's like if we sold clean rooms and our customers were testing them by walking in right after being in a major storm (dripping wet, mud on shoes, etc.) and then concluding that the clean room doesn't work because it didn't keep them clean.

I'm excited to test this. I have a couple of drives that the clients just couldn't afford a data recovery specialist (or at that time could not), and made the decision to abandon their data. These are drives I've deemed a low chance of a catastrophic mechanical failure, that they've suffered a logical failure that can't be resolved through various channels, firmware issues of some sort, head crashes due to being a laptop, and similar. I want to see if I can first off offer these customers the 'surprise! I found a solution and got some/all your photos back!', and if it is a viable/firstline option before sending it to a specialist (And reduce my workload.)

The idea of throwing mechanically-unsound drives at these, and hoping this is snakeoil, is a little silly. Hopefully you can encourage this tech against it. ;)
 
Our test unit came in today also. We were slammed today, but tomorrow we will break into the box of "NFG" drives and give it a whirl. I have a HFS+ disc that I have wanted to try with something else for quite awhile. Feel like a kid at Christmas! Really hoping to be impressed.
 
Second candidate arrived today. WD5000AAKS built on 20Jan2010. PC would not boot. Drive would spin, and made no odd noise. Slaved drive to both a bench Windows and Linux machine, neither recognized it.

Imaged with RapidSpar in about 90 minutes. Replace drive in clients machine. Windows 10 went through its automatic repair, rebooted, and the machine is as good as new!
 
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