Diagnostics

In-depth diagnostics is needed for each and every hard drive that comes in for data recovery service. Atola Insight can test all hard drive components:

Electronics (circuit board)
Motor
Heads
Media surface
Firmware area
Partitions and file systems

Atola DiskSense unit has short-circuit protection on board, thus enabling you to diagnose severely damaged hard drives.

The diagnostics can be performed in fully automatic mode. Automatic diagnostics allows to determine the exact issue with the hard drive.

Real time current monitor

The data collected by the current monitor is used for automatic hard drive diagnostics (to detect frozen motor, damaged electronics, etc). 5V and 12V currents are monitored separately.

Atola Insight also includes an oscilloscope that allows the operator to watch hard drive power consumption levels. There are two kinds of oscilloscope in Atola Insight: full-size monitor and tiny monitor. Tiny monitor can always stay on the screen allowing to always keep an eye on hard drive’s power consumption, whereas full size monitor provides more details.

The image below shows normal spin-up and initialization currents (5V and 12V) for a desktop hard drive.

Full-size real time current monitor in Atola Insight

Media scan

Media Scan reveals read delays and errors (bad sectors). While scanning, two graphs are created: one shows the exact time needed to read a block of sectors (in milliseconds), another shows the speed in megabytes per second. Media Scan is used to determine surface and head damage.

The image below shows media scan graphs of a good hard drive:

An example of how it will look on a damaged surface:

Significant delays (over 20ms average per block) show that there is media damage

Note that yellow peaks do not represent bad blocks. However, they show that it was hard to read those sectors (hard drive did a lot of re-reads and ECC correction).

Another example:

Patterns of significant delays and errors suggest head damage

In this example you can see patterns of significant delays and read errors. This is a clear indication of a head failure.

Automatic Checkup

Fully automatic disk checkup does everything: checks hard drive’s electronics, motor, head stack, media surface, all firmware/system areas, partitions and file systems. After the check, the exact issue is determined.

In most cases the software is able to suggest the exact steps to get the recovery done.