Recovery Force® Data Recovery Forum

I have a drive that I'm going to use as a test. It is a 1TB WD 2.5" FBLite that my notes say that we encountered the following issues:

SMART failure
heads 0 and 3 struggle to read at the front of the drive
had slow responding issues that were fixed
mirrored 1,953,512,040 of 1,953,525,168 sectors with DDI4
it is not precisesly documented, but it looks like we did the mirror in less than 24 hours

I plan to re-run DDI4, as my last test, for accuracy. I'm going to clone the drive in the following order:

• ddrescue (ddrescue source dest logfile) without any switches
• hddsuperclone
• rapidpar
• PC3K DE
• DDI4
• MRT Ultra (only if I decide to pay for another month for testing)

I'm cloning drive to drive...and plan to keep reusing the same destination clone.

ddrescue has started and is currently showing an ETA of 7 days 5 hours, down from the initial 35 days it showed when first started. I'm very busy here right now and will be down a man for 2 weeks, so it is difficult to predict how long it will take to complete the test.

I'll post results as they come in here...and will then make a summary afterwards.

Terrific, Luke. Looking forward to results. It might have been good to include HDDSuperClone, as well, but there's only so much time available. Plus, there are comparative tests already underway between ddrescue and HDDSuperClone on HDD Oracle's forum.

I might try hddsuperclone, too. But as it isn't a program that I've been able to easily install within my working Fedora distributions, I've yet to actually try the program out. It is so much easier to install a program by typing "yum install xxx" or "dnf install xxx". Perhaps that has improved since my last attempt to install it.

Just went to the HDDSuperClone site and discovered that there are now downloadable RPM installers. Got it installed and will run it after ddrescue completes.

ddrescue finished the first default pass yesterday.
Now I've set it to clean up with a -r 3 (3 retries) setting. Currently it has been running for 1d 41m, is on Retry 2 and has dropped the errorsize to 6449 kB and errors to 1468.

On the surface, it is looking like ddrescue might be getting a better result than the original run of DDI4. But, when we ran DDI4, our main focus was recovering a client's data, not getting the best clone possible for the entire drive. So, we would have focused our bad sector cleanup strictly to the targeted file structure. But, this is why I will be redoing the DDI4 clone for this test.

ddrescue finished the 3 retry cleanup after almost 38 hours.
So, with a combined total of 59 hours of imaging, ddrescue was able read all but 6434 kiB (12,868 sectors) . I've attached the ddrescue log file to this post.

Now, let's see how hddsuperclone will do, in comparison.

After a full run of hddsuperclone with default settings:
As I did with ddrescue, now running with a 3 retry setting to see if it can cut into some of those unread sectors.

Here is the final result of HDDSuperClone after about 62 hours for running.
The log file is attached.

Started RapidSpar imaing via RSI unit only, in Balanced mode.

According to the log, ddrescue actually recovered all but 12568. But the estimated first run of ddrescue without retries would have been about 13166, would would be real close to the 13128 from DDI4.

HDDSuperClone recovered many less sectors (14360 total), and did not gain much at all during the retries. So my question is, is the drive degrading? Or is it repeatable that ddrescue can recover that many more sectors than hddsuperclone on this drive?

And what of the results of the Rapidspar?