PC-3000 SSD Extended. Ramaxel and Lenovo Utility

Posted on 12/20/2022 by ACELab team

Hello friends!

If you’re familiar with SSD data recovery, you should have already faced different types of controllers and know that Marvell-based drives are one of the most complex to work with.
The main thing is that every single manufacturer dealing with Marvell controllers writes their own firmware for each SSD model. It adds a lot of additional issues for our developers trying to find the solution for such drives. As you know, to be able to work with the drive that has some FW issues we need to have a special utility developed for this particular model of the drive.

Beginning with the PC-3000 software version 7.1.x, a couple of drives based on  88SS1093 has been added. We already had some drives with this controller in the support list but because of the complexity of such controllers adding new drives has been not so easy. Our developers managed to find out how to work with Ramaxel and Lenovo modifications of this controller, and in this article, you will see what steps should be taken if you need to recover data from such SSDs. Continue reading →

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How to use PC-3000 Portable III incorrectly and lose your warranty

Posted on 12/13/2022 by ACELab team

The ports of PC-3000 Portable III (Port 0, 1, 2) function using high-speed PCIe-1, 2 and SATA-1, 2, 3 protocols thus providing for the data transfer rates up to 5 and 6 Gbit/s respectively, i.e. effectively the data transfer rate reaches the SHF radio frequency range imposing particular requirements on the transfer lines (PCB conductors, interface cables, detachable connectors). To ensure correct functioning of such high-speed serial interfaces, every part thereof including the Host (microcontroller), Interconnect (transfer line), and the Device (the drive), should be in balanced alignment with each other.

Figure 1. Data transfer line

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PC-3000 SAS. List of supported hard drives

Posted on 12/12/2022 by ACELab team

       

PC-3000 SAS can work with SAS and SCSI drives (requires an additional third-party SCSI adapter).

PC-3000 Portable III with SAS Adapter and Utilities is able to work only with native SAS drives and does not support old IBM families.

Continue reading →

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PC-3000 HDD. List of supported HDD families (7.3.x)

Posted on 12/12/2022 by ACELab team

 

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PC-3000 for HDD. How to unlock SED on WD SMR drives without a special board

Posted on 07/28/2022 by ACELab team

Hello dear friends,

In June 2022, we released a new PC-3000 software version 7.1.x,  and one of the main features in this update is the SED unlocking option for new WD SMR families.

It means that now you don’t need to buy a special unlocked PCB to get the Service Area access on these drives anymore!

In this article, we describe how to use this option in practice.

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PC-3000 Flash. Determination of Some Chip Parameters by ID

Posted on 06/07/2022 by ACELab team


There are situations when you are reading a chip and see a detected Chip ID but it cannot be applied in the Task. As a result, it doesn’t allow to read the dump from the memory chip. Such behaviour may be if:

► The chip has physical damages or was overheated during the unsoldering process
► The memory chips reference book doesn’t have reading parameters for a certain Chip ID.

The information below will be useful when adding read parameters for new (unknown) memory chips and is intended for users who understand the main principles of NAND.
If you are new in NAND data recovery, we recommend studying these principles first.
Of course, you can try to find a datasheet for a certain memory chip and take reading parameters from there. But sometimes there is no possibility to find that datasheet or some parameters are missing there (not described).

Reading parameters detection is an investigation process and requires some specific knowledge. In this article, we’ll overview some ideas that can be helpful for you during this process. Anyway, we strongly recommend to contact our Technical Support Department if you get an unsupported NAND ID during your data recovery process.
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PC-3000 Flash. SanDisk 200 GB mSD recovery

Posted on 03/31/2022 by ACELab team

Hi everyone,

Today we are going to talk about the monolith cases produced by SanDisk, namely presented in the variations of 200 GB and 400 GB models.

Such cards were released a few years ago and remained the mSD cards with the highest capacity for years until the 256 and 512 GB modifications replaced them.

Nowadays, SanDisk Flash drives are one of the most complicated cases. Usually, they have a lot of additional issues and features that are typical only for SanDisk modifications.

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, PC-3000 Flash | 3 Comments

Western Digital: Time-Limited Error Recovery

Posted on 01/26/2022 by ACELab team

Bad sectors may appear because of the bad quality of the heads or due to small scratches on the surface of the platters. This problem is pretty up-to-date and sometimes, when you don’t have an opportunity to replace the heads or open the HDA on the Hard Drive, the only way to get the data is to be patient and reread all bad sectors one by one with different time-out settings in the Data Extractor.

But what to do if the WD disks have a lot of BAD sectors, and it is necessary to force the disk to complete the image?

Continue reading →

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PC-3000 HDD. How to Block Writing in Service Area in Seagate F3

Posted on 01/17/2022 by ACELab team

Modern Seagate drives are very complex, and their hardware becomes more and more sensitive. If heads have issues, they can damage some critical objects in the Service Area during the internal FW processes. It may be a reason for data recovery time increase: we must spend more time and money to find new heads and fix bad system files. Is it possible to avoid that and block the writing in the Service Area? Let’s review that in this article.

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PC-3000 SAS. How to Solve the Medium Format Corrupted Issue on Hitachi SAS Drives

Posted on 01/13/2022 by ACELab team

Nowadays, more and more SAS drives are used for storing data and therefore become damaged due to continuous use. Some of them require spare parts, but some of them can be fixed by software methods.
In this article, you can learn how to deal with Hitachi SAS drives with the mentioned issue using the PC-3000 SAS System.

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