Strange external hard drive connection, needs data recovery.

[MobileTechie]

I was wondering if you could tell me why? I am just asking. I use USB 3.0 external drive adapters, and I thought they were the cats meow, but if, in the end, they will bite me, I need to know why.

Thank you, and have a great day.

If the drive is physically working OK and data loss is down to being written over, lost partition sectors or other logical errors then USB is just as good as ATA as far as I know.

But when the drive is having problems reading its own data due to problems with firmware, PCB or mechanical errors; or if you need full diagnostic access, then direct ATA access is required because the USB implementation of the ATA command set is only partial and doesn't allow full information. It's an OS level interpretation mostly focussed on allowing normally working drives to operate over the USB interface. Again, this is as far as I know.

It's certainly true, even in my experience, that there are drives in certain states that will not get recognised via USB but will via ATA which is clearly a major advantage in that situation.

So it's not true to say that DR should only ever be done via ATA. It depends what the problem is.

 

[wimwauters]

I was wondering if you could tell me why? I am just asking. I use USB 3.0 external drive adapters, and I thought they were the cats meow, but if, in the end, they will bite me, I need to know why.

Also, have a look for benchmarks that compare docks or enclosures using USB3 versus eSATA or SATA2.

It's all about driver quality, and on top of that, USB will always have to cater for keyboards and printers and such.