RapidSpar Demo Program

[MudRock]

So a sub-standard controller. Always handy.

 

[AiTim]

It has been a while since we demoed the unit. But we were impressed, it was able to recover data from drives we had given up on. Overall, i think it is a very solid unit and plan on purchasing one, when the funds free up for us to do so. Thanks so much for allowing us to demo!

 

[Nossy Drelich]

This is a great device, and works well. It does need a USB3 port which makes sense, but its standalone features allow you to use it even if you dont have one. It looks really cool and professional too like the briefcase of a secret agent. In a world where looks do matter that is a plus in the industry. I look foreward to getting one when the funds allow me to do so. Some features that would be nice, would be to make a app for Android and iPhone, and allow to control from those devices with cables, as well as data recovery for said devices. Thanks for the opportunity to demo.

 

[kwest]

I have several drives that I want to test. Willing to buy one if we can get a full refund if we are not satisfied. Or send over on of the demos. Patiently waiting.

 

[Vlad P]

I have several drives that I want to test. Willing to buy one if we can get a full refund if we are not satisfied. Or send over on of the demos. Patiently waiting.

KWEST, You are in line. You should get your demo within a couple of weeks. I will give you a call beforehand to confirm.

Vlad

 

[kwest]

KWEST, You are in line. You should get your demo within a couple of weeks. I will give you a call beforehand to confirm.

Vlad

Sounds good. I am happy to buy upfront as long as I can return if we decide it isn't a fit. But we can wait a few weeks.

Thank you for the opportunity.

 

[P-List]

Sounds good. I am happy to buy upfront as long as I can return if we decide it isn't a fit. But we can wait a few weeks.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Unfortunately it's difficult for us to offer a return policy. We'd have to start selling used equipment that was returned to us and there are a lot of issues associated with that. That's why we are doing this demo program instead. We should be able to get you a demo unit pretty soon. We've been increasing the number of demo units to get to everyone faster. We'll be up to 10 by the end of this month.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

Unfortunately it's difficult for us to offer a return policy. We'd have to start selling used equipment that was returned to us and there are a lot of issues associated with that. That's why we are doing this demo program instead. We should be able to get you a demo unit pretty soon. We've been increasing the number of demo units to get to everyone faster. We'll be up to 10 by the end of this month.

What is going to happen to the demo units once the demo is over? I would imagine that some shops would take a demo unit at reduced cost if available.

 

[MudRock]

What is going to happen to the demo units once the demo is over? I would imagine that some shops would take a demo unit at reduced cost if available.

I wound concider picking up the demo unit I had at a discounted rate.

 

[P-List]

What is going to happen to the demo units once the demo is over? I would imagine that some shops would take a demo unit at reduced cost if available.

We are seeing great results from this demo program, so we currently have no intention of closing it. We never stopped accepting new applications. In fact, we are expanding it by opening it up to participants from outside of Technibble (rapidspar.com has a new "Demo" button) and adding extra demo units into the mix to speed everything up.

 

[phaZed]

Fist, I would like to thank DeepSpar and Vlad for the opportunity to test out the RapidSpar.

The RapidSpar unit is EXACTLY what they claim it to be... a mild data recovery device that 'solves 50% of the cases software tools fail on, designed for IT generalists and non-expert data recovery practitioners'. This is NOT a DeepSpar! With that being said, the device does exactly what it claims to and does a good job at it. The learning curve to get started with this thing is nill and takes minutes(seconds) to get going. The software is spartan, yet *almost* fully suited for the task at hand (Read below). The device is well-polished and well-rounded - good job guys... as someone who dabbles in Electrical Engineering, I can see a lot of R&D and thought went into this and understand the challenges involved in a product like this. Kudos!

It turns out a week (or almost 10 days in my case) leaves you wanting to test it further. Barring the known-bad drives I have sitting in a box(Yep, they're still bad beyond basic recovery), I ran about 6-7 drives on this unit and only had one 'weird' incident. All drives were successes except for a Seagate. The cloning/recovery/RapidNebula/MBR read completed and upon recovering the users pictures they were all corrupt. I was able to see thumbnails of the images, but opening them in a image program (Photoshop CS6, Windows Photo Viewer) produced a corrupt, single-color grey image. I noticed that the RapidSpar was experiencing a "skip" reading during the recovery. It was a consistent and precisely timed skip in reading every 1/2 second or so. The RapidSpar reported a full recovery. This drive was 100% readable and cloned under ddrescue and pictures were fully recovered that way. Talking to the DeepSpar team briefly we concluded that there may be an issue with the algorithm used to recover drive data for this particular drive. Unfortunately, the drive and job had been handed to the customer so no further testing or sample could be provided to the team for further analysis.

The biggest PRO for this unit:
Being able to power-cycle the device manually and automatically during a recovery when a drive goes wonky/offline due to bad sectors is awesome. This feature alone, for me, is one of the biggest features 'missing' from direct SATA/ddrescue operations. This saves a lot of manual unplugs of the drive from SATA power and can potentially allow the recovery of these types where I may have given up using a traditional ddrescue computer setup. Let's face it, I'm not going to plug/unplug the drive a few thousand times! The RapidSpar accomplishes the power cycle within a second or so and is right back to where it left off. Fantastic! Very efficient.

The good:
The device is rock-solid. No abnormal behavior, lockups or other weirdness to be seen. (Maybe USB, but they get a pass from me.. it's technical, see below)
The screen is adequate albeit, small. It could have not had a screen at all or one a lot worse and still performed the same function. Most of the screen is for sector-scanning eye-candy, which is nice for at-a-glance status monitoring. Things that matter most like the touchscreen buttons and messages at the bottom were easy enough for me to see and interact with. Having no physical buttons is great. The interface was responsive and easy to use (Dead simple).

Recovers data/cloning! Yes, it happens to recover data from bad hard drives, too!

Super simple and intuitive. I can't say I even have an idea on how to make it any more simple that it already is.

RapidNebula is a neat idea and it will be interesting to see how well this approach works and what benefits come from it.

The software and hardware platform are very flexible. Firmware updates and software have the potential to be even better with time.

The less-than-good:
I say, "almost" for the software because I would really like to see a logical file recovery facility built-in that does not rely on recovering the MFT in order to list the files. This is more of a 'wish' than a requirement and would be above and beyond what the device is marketed as.

USB compatibility. RapidSpar does not like USB Hubs and even some USB case headers... go for the jugular and hook into the MOBO directly. I have a U-Speed USB 3.0 powered Hub (1.5A) and the RapidSpar did not like it. Also did not like my Cooler Master HAF USB 2.0 front panel case ports. Hooking direct to the MOBO or "straight to header" USB 3.0 ports is the way to go. USB support at high speeds can be a real PITA, but the RapidSpar seems to be particularly picky here. This could be an issue if you are at a clients home, for instance.

RapidSpar software does not handle unexpected USB disconnects (Physically pull cable out, for instance) very well and simply crashes. Some error handling for that would be nice. Also, I found myself forgetting to "Run as Admin" - wish this would run as Admin automatically.

Something to mention:
There is a curious "Serial" 2.5 plug port for drive Firmware manipulation (I'm assuming) that has no mention in the software nor the manual. Can we get some information as to the use and function of this feature? Is this implemented yet? Just curious as to the functions this will be able to handle.

Price. I don't want to "be that guy" but I feel it a little steep, as a consumer. I understand that we're making money here and that the unit can potentially pay for itself quickly and DeepSpar has quite an investment in this project... but at $2K, IMO just a tad high considering simply the hardware.
Considering the R&D costs and the benefits from limiting non-professionals from the data recovery field.. it very well may be priced right where it needs to be. I consider DeepSpar to be the Cadillac of recovery devices, so I expect to pay for it.. but it's going to be hard, for me, to drop ddrescue and basic computer for the cost vs. benefit.

Summary:
This device will fill a certain niche for techs that don't want to learn data recovery but need a tool that provides simple and reliable drive duplication and "best-case" file recovery where the MFT is available and largely undamaged. If you are not interested in firing up ddrescue as your second hobby and need something that works consistently (unlike a $50 2-bay SATA USB dock), this is your tool! Again, great job goes to the RapidSpar team! This one's going to be a winner!

 

[lcoughey]

With regards to "Run As Admin", you can right click on the link on your desktop, go to properties, click on advanced, select "Run as administrator", click OK and always run as admin each time you run the program.

I ran a test case with an in-house drive that had stuck heads. The unit's diagnostic is still struggling to quickly diagnose stuck heads, but seeing that I knew that they were stuck before I connected the drive, I was okay with that.

Upon freeing up the heads in the clean room, I decided to let RapidSpar have first dibs on the drive to image it before re-doing it with DeepSpar. The end result was that DeepSpar was able to read 1 more sector than RapidSpar, based on the option to dig out bad blocks on RapidSpar and default settings with DeepSpar. If I had more time to play, I could probably push DeepSpar to read a few more sectors, but it really isn't necessary.

As I have a unit here all the time, if anyone wants me to run a specific test, let me know and I will see what I can do to set it up and report back.

 

[Vlad P]

Happy Friday everyone.

@phaZed Thank you very much for your review.
@everyone If you are interested, you can send me some pictures of the RapidSpar unit in your shop and we will give your business a shout out through our social media channels. Or alternatively you can post it on your wall or tweet and we will re-post it to our followers.

Vlad

 

[P-List]

Thanks for the awesome review Aaron! A few notes/answers below.

All drives were successes except for a Seagate. The cloning/recovery/RapidNebula/MBR read completed and upon recovering the users pictures they were all corrupt. I was able to see thumbnails of the images, but opening them in a image program (Photoshop CS6, Windows Photo Viewer) produced a corrupt, single-color grey image. I noticed that the RapidSpar was experiencing a "skip" reading during the recovery. It was a consistent and precisely timed skip in reading every 1/2 second or so. The RapidSpar reported a full recovery. This drive was 100% readable and cloned under ddrescue and pictures were fully recovered that way. Talking to the DeepSpar team briefly we concluded that there may be an issue with the algorithm used to recover drive data for this particular drive. Unfortunately, the drive and job had been handed to the customer so no further testing or sample could be provided to the team for further analysis.

This does indeed look like a bug with the way we parsed the MFT on that particular case. If anyone runs into a case like this, please contact us while you still have the drive. Almost all of these cases are easy fixes that we could patch within 1-2 days if we could have a chance to look at the drive remotely. An alternative would have been to right click on Hard Drive (above partitions on the left) and press "recover all used sectors" which would have recovered all sectors in use by the file system, so there wouldn't be holes left in the pictures. Of course there is the full clone as well.

The biggest PRO for this unit:
Being able to power-cycle the device manually and automatically during a recovery when a drive goes wonky/offline due to bad sectors is awesome. This feature alone, for me, is one of the biggest features 'missing' from direct SATA/ddrescue operations. This saves a lot of manual unplugs of the drive from SATA power and can potentially allow the recovery of these types where I may have given up using a traditional ddrescue computer setup. Let's face it, I'm not going to plug/unplug the drive a few thousand times! The RapidSpar accomplishes the power cycle within a second or so and is right back to where it left off. Fantastic! Very efficient.

It's much more than power cycling! We power cycle the drive only as the last resort, since it's very harsh on the drive and usually not necessary. I believe what you might be talking about are the resets we are using. (That's when yellow blocks appear on the display.) Here is a rough idea of what we are doing for read instability handling on average cases:

1) RapidNebula tests the drive to see how it responds to different types of reset commands to choose the right type of primary reset to use. It also checks how the drive processes standard read commands on weak/bad sectors, how long it takes to process resets, how reliable the resets are in different situations, etc. for the purposes of determining an efficient read timeout value to use for this case. These settings are written to the project files on the built-in SSD inside the RapidSpar device.
2) When you load this project, these settings are loaded from the SSD into the firmware of our ATA controller.
3) When RapidSpar starts reading the drive, our ATA controller will wait on any particular read command until the read timeout value is reached, which would typically be between 200ms and 1000ms depending on RapidNebula's choices.
4) Upon reaching timeout, it will send the chosen reset command to the drive, which in the vast majority of cases will force the drive to stop processing the unsuccessful read command. (Software tools can not do this, and must instead wait the full 3-7 seconds every time they hit a bad sector.)
5) If the reset command does not work (i.e. the drive continues to be stuck in the busy state doing bad things), it will try to reset the drive in two other different ways.
6) If all three reset procedures failed, the drive will be power cycled. This should happen very rarely.
7) If the first power cycle doesn't work, it will do two more.
8) If all three power cycles failed to bring the drive back to ready state, the drive will be shut off and the recovery will stop with an error.

The less-than-good:
I say, "almost" for the software because I would really like to see a logical file recovery facility built-in that does not rely on recovering the MFT in order to list the files. This is more of a 'wish' than a requirement and would be above and beyond what the device is marketed as.

USB compatibility. RapidSpar does not like USB Hubs and even some USB case headers... go for the jugular and hook into the MOBO directly. I have a U-Speed USB 3.0 powered Hub (1.5A) and the RapidSpar did not like it. Also did not like my Cooler Master HAF USB 2.0 front panel case ports. Hooking direct to the MOBO or "straight to header" USB 3.0 ports is the way to go. USB support at high speeds can be a real PITA, but the RapidSpar seems to be particularly picky here. This could be an issue if you are at a clients home, for instance.

RapidSpar software does not handle unexpected USB disconnects (Physically pull cable out, for instance) very well and simply crashes. Some error handling for that would be nice. Also, I found myself forgetting to "Run as Admin" - wish this would run as Admin automatically.

For the logical recovery side, the only alternatives to going by the MFT are going by $Bitmap (already implemented with the "recover all used sectors" button) and doing raw recovery. Raw recovery involves reading the entire drive, so a full clone has to be done. There are lots of software tools that do a great job with raw recovery (like R-Studio), but they are missing proper read instability handling. Our thought process for these cases was that the user would make a full clone with the RapidSpar device (handling read instability issues) and then scan the clone with R-Studio or similar. We didn't implement raw recovery functionality because it doesn't do anything to help the actual recovery part of the process. When we do it by MFT or $Bitmap, we are eliminating unnecessary sectors from the recovery process, which improves success rates (less opportunity for the drive to have a problem if we have to read fewer sectors). In raw recovery we need the whole drive, so there is nothing to eliminate.

Still working on USB connectivity issues. We've made a lot of progress over the past few months, but there is still a good way to go before it'll work with all types of hubs/controllers.

Crashing on unexpected USB disconnects will be fixed within a few weeks.

Something to mention:
There is a curious "Serial" 2.5 plug port for drive Firmware manipulation (I'm assuming) that has no mention in the software nor the manual. Can we get some information as to the use and function of this feature? Is this implemented yet? Just curious as to the functions this will be able to handle.

This is a connection to the serial port of the drive. It will be required to fix some types of firmware issues in the future. RapidNebula will start to ask for that port to be connected in some cases later this year.

Thanks again for taking the time to review RapidSpar!

 

[phaZed]

Hat's off to you guys! Thanks!

The drive resetting stuff you're doing is really taking the cake, for me.

@lcoughey @P-List - The "Run as Admin" issue, super minor issue, just wanted to point it out for the software devs. I had to really be picky to find faults with it, lol.

 

[Dionysis Kalimeris]

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!

Is this available to UK or just the US?

 

[Vlad P]

It is available for UK, Canada, US and Australia. For program terms and conditions follow this link http://rapidspar.com/demoterms.html

 

[Vlad P]

Hello Everyone.

A friendly reminder to all of our demo participants. Please post your feedback on your experience with RapidSpar if you haven't done this already. It's really important for us to understand real life demands of your clients and yours as a service provider. With your help RapidSpar will improve and address your needs so you make you more money and help more customers.

On a side note. We have 3 applications from Australia. We need 2 more participants to ship the unit. Share among your Ausie friends.

Vlad

 

[pcoverhaul]

I purchased a unit and have been extremely happy with it. The only real issue I have had is that I used a USB hub to connect it, but connecting directly solved the connection problems. As a one man business, I haven't had as many opportunities to use it as some of the other people here but I'd say the success rate is still close to 80%. Great product!

 

[Your PCMD]

$1,995.00, sorry, Ill stick with Acronis. Also, judging from the video, this would not work if there is no internet connection OR would be extremely slow with slower DSL and yes, even dial-up (we still have customers on dial-up) connection.

I just cannot see the cost justification. We've built a cloning station for a quarter of the cost of this device and there is no customers data floating out there on the cloud.