RapidSpar Demo Program

[Krynn72]

Interested in hearing how it goes for you guys, so be sure to post your reviews here in addition to wherever else. If nobody takes the final spots I might sign up too. We don't see enough drives like this for me to be able to really test it (probably one or two in the week we'd have have) so it would be better if someone else takes the spot. But I really want to check it out if nobody else will

 

[MudRock]

Man, wish I had this right now. Perfect candidate just walked in. Haha

 

[lcoughey]

Man, wish I had this right now. Perfect candidate just walked in. Haha

Care to elaborate? If you want to ship the drive to me, I'd be happy to test and see if it works with RapidSpar for you.

 

[MudRock]

Care to elaborate? If you want to ship the drive to me, I'd be happy to test and see if it works with RapidSpar for you.

Hehe. WD laptop Blue (WD2500BEVT). Shows one weak/pending sector; 21 G-Sense, and nothing else. SMART short test fails instantly. It crashes the laptop during boot. Put another drive in I use for testing the interface, works fine. Windows test bench, crashes at random. Linux it'll start, but I'm afraid to start a clone. No abnormal sounds, sounds like other BEVTs I've had good in and similar family drives. No excess heat. I could pull out my infrared to test, but it sits cool.

 

[lcoughey]

Hehe. WD laptop Blue (WD2500BEVT). Shows one weak/pending sector; 21 G-Sense, and nothing else. SMART short test fails instantly. It crashes the laptop during boot. Put another drive in I use for testing the interface, works fine. Windows test bench, crashes at random. Linux it'll start, but I'm afraid to start a clone. No abnormal sounds, sounds like other BEVTs I've had good in and similar family drives. No excess heat. I could pull out my infrared to test, but it sits cool.

You can try to start imaging with ddrescue...if you start to see the unread/skipped sector count go up, stop right away. It might just be a good candidate for RapidSpar, but may also be something a little more complex.

 

[Ken's PC Repair]

Third drive was a bust. WD Blue. Was able to load the file tree, but recovered very few files. Can't win them all!

 

[MudRock]

You can try to start imaging with ddrescue...if you start to see the unread/skipped sector count go up, stop right away. It might just be a good candidate for RapidSpar, but may also be something a little more complex.

ddrescue worked perfectly. Perfect clone. I decided I wanted to test ddrescue vs. Windows clones. ddrescue was successful, so when I confirmed I had all the client data, I tested 2 Windows clone tools. Both failed promptly!

 

[Ken's PC Repair]

Fourth drive. 500GB Seagate slim drive (reassembled netbook without noting the model number). Drive not viable in Windows or Linux. Not able to clone drive, but was able to successfully grab all the data from the user profiles!

 

[Ken's PC Repair]

Drive #5 was a 1TB Seagate Barracuda in a Lenovo desktop PC that wouldn't boot. Was able to backup some of the user files using FABS, but had a long list of failures. Attempted to clone using HD Clone, but the process froze just a few minutes in. Imaged with RapidSpar in just under 3 hours. Installed the imaged drive back in the desktop and it fired right up.

This was the last dive we worked with and have shipped it off to the next shop. We went ahead and purchased this device. This will give us an option to offer customers when they have data they would like to recover, but isn't the end of the world if they don't. For 'mission critical' drives/data we will continue to refer them to data labs as this is not our area of expertise.

Thanks to Serge and Vladimir at DeepSpar for the support and opportunity to test this device!

 

[MudRock]

This makes me very excited!

 

[MyTG]

I just finished my week long trial of the RaidSpar and I must say it worked even better than I expected. It was able to mount and retrieve data from a number of drives that I could not pull data from with software alone. There were some initial bugs with the device as this is a relatively new unit, but the DeepSpar team were quick to respond to any feedback with firmware updates for the device. I recommend you sign up for a demo if you are even slightly interested.

 

[Doc+Com]

If the demo program still running?....I thought that a list was going to be published with the trialists in a date order. Is this still the case?

 

[MyTG]

The people from Deepspar email the current demo users to notify them to ship it to the next person in line for the unit. I was allowed to keep the unit for one week. I am not aware of any online list of who is next in line.

 

[Doc+Com]

I was referring to this quote from post #11;

"When we fill up completely, we will post up a timing schedule to show who is getting demo units and when".

 

[P-List]

Sorry about the lack of updates! We are averaging about 2 weeks per demo tester, so it’s going slower than we originally thought. We are getting useful feedback, so we’ve been allowing users extra time to finish their recoveries/testing whenever they need it. Unfortunately such a liberal stance means that we can’t predict when everyone will get their demo unit, so for the time being we are posting up the current status. We try to call everyone a few days before they receive their demo unit to give a heads up.

Completed:
Slaters Kustum Machines – Unfortunately we can’t work with Dell computers yet, so the user couldn’t give it a try (https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/rapidspar-demo-program.68924/#post-541716)
Ken's PC Repair – went well (https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/rapidspar-demo-program.68924/page-2#post-542785)
Hampden Comp – the user had a lot of strange issues which we have not seen before. We are not sure what happened yet, but this hardware might be faulty. Waiting on feedback from the next user who just received this hardware yesterday.
MyTG – went well (https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/rapidspar-demo-program.68924/page-2#post-543010)

Currently testing:
AlexanderCS – Have not heard back yet. Feedback incoming.
Myleso – Had connectivity issues which were resolved after plugging it in through a USB hub. Seems to be going well otherwise. Feedback incoming.
San Marcos Computers - Feedback incoming. Just received the unit yesterday.
AiTim – Seems to be going well. Feedback incoming.

Will be testing:
RCD_Technology_Solutions
Doc+Com
MudRock
Patriot Computers
calldrdave
phaZed
untoldtech
Merlin Halteman
tenyardfight

A few spots are still left. We removed a few people from our list in cases where we could not find any kind of information on their company online. We didn’t feel comfortable sending this hardware to private individuals without an online presence we could check. It’s possible we made a mistake, so if you registered and you don’t see your name on the list despite having a website, please send me a message and we’ll have a look.

I am more on the technical side myself, so I’ve asked one of my co-workers to start posting more frequent updates in this thread. Hopefully the users currently testing will post something as well.

 

[phaZed]

Yay! I made the cut! Thanks for the update!

 

[AlexanderCS]

It looks like I've got this guy until Monday. I'm trying to run it through about 15 2.5" and 9 3.5" drives, in various states. Some healthy, some not -- none of which have been hammered away at.

I'm liking it so far. I'm impressed with RapidSpar Assistant... it shows you the quality of the heads, you can submit diagnostic info and have the drive "optimized" for a recovery. What I'll maybe do is a recovery of some data on a drive, see how long it takes, then optimize it and see if there are any improvements.

Regardless, it's definitely more efficient than the toaster drive I've got and easier to set up/play with that mucking about on a ddrescue CD. I can see having this in my kit (the only thing stopping me right now is cost, especially given the US/CAD conversion).

 

[Doc+Com]

Thanks for the update P-List. Its handy to know as I have a few customers sitting on hard drives that I could not access and/or read data from and I can now call and put then on notice to bring in their drives to be tested.
Again, many thanks for the opportunity to demo what sounds like an exciting device.

 

[P-List]

I'm liking it so far. I'm impressed with RapidSpar Assistant... it shows you the quality of the heads, you can submit diagnostic info and have the drive "optimized" for a recovery. What I'll maybe do is a recovery of some data on a drive, see how long it takes, then optimize it and see if there are any improvements.

Great idea for a test! Make sure you test drives with read instability problems, since that's what the optimizations are for. It should go through bad areas quicker after an optimization run. It won't make any difference on healthy drives.

To clear the optimizations which were previously loaded you'll need to format the internal SSD (using rsasetup.exe) and then repower the RapidSpar device (to clear its RAM). Otherwise the optimizations will persist even if you restart the project. We designed it to store the optimized settings based on the serial number of the connected Source drive, so normally it should only be optimized once and the right settings will always be applied to the right drive until the internal SSD is reformatted.

 

[San Marcos Computers]

I have it in hand and working since Tue afternoon. I haven't logged my efforts so far as I should have. It's a crazy week as I'm trying to obtain a new rental 3 doors down from me, 2.5 times the size for the same rent I pay now. Fingers and toes crossed on that.

I've put a few real time jobs through the unit though. So far:

#1 - Laptop drive Linux wouldn't recognize at all. Was able to fire up with RapidSpar and retrieve the data.

#2 - Laptop drive. Initially showed read errors with RDT. I stopped what I was doing and easily retrieved data with RS.

# 3 - Laptop drive. A bit of a mystery. Customer did not care about data just wanted a new drive and fresh install. I only had the drive for a short amount of time. Spun with no noises. Linux would not recognize. Attached to RS, drive recognized, heads good. When attempting to recover data RS claimed no recognizable file format. (If I recall correctly). Customer came back at that time and took the computer and old drive. So I wasn't able to investigate further.

#4 & #5 were healthy. Used RS to image drives that I was flopping around in customer's Macbooks

# 6. 2 TB Seagate 3.5" drive with bad sectors. Imaging now to a new drive. 45% complete in about an hour if I remember the time correctly.

More to come. Hopefully I can concentrate a bit and give better details. So far, so good though. I recovered at least 1 that I wouldn't have been able to recover otherwise. And all but 1 of the others were smooth as silk. Did exactly what I needed.