CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Data Compass with Data Compass Explorer is now the premier choice amongst the Data Recovery Industry for fast and effective extraction of data from hard drive's with severe unreadable sectors, media degradation and failing read/write heads. It is now officially my favourite tool in my vast collection of data recovery solutions and it is only going to get better over time once the new functions are completed. I especially look forward to the head selection function and the future Seagate, Western Digital firmware bypassing options. I'm so impressed I am considering ordering several more in the near future. Michael Owen, Managing Director Datatrack Labs Ltd. www.datatrack-labs.co.uk

I've started playing with settings of Data Compass and found it quite easy to use. I've already carried out a couple of data rescue tests with success and I'm quite satisfied about the performance of the tool.

Filippo Corsi
Computer Discount Siena
www.computerdiscount.it

"The SalvationDATA Data Compass easily helps me get rid of SA bad sectors which can't be repaired by other drive restoration products we've been using before, because it gives access to user data area directly by using its Analog technology which virtually boot the hard drive SA-independently."

- Yimei Cao, Lead Data Recovery Engineer
CBL Data Recovery Technologies Inc
www.cbltech.com

"Data Compass helps us to restore data from hard drives suffer from sever bad sectors, which are not able to be recovered from other tools in the DR market. Especially, by using the advanced Service Area (SA) emulation technology, it accesses the data from firmware defective hard drives directly. Also, multiple settings of the reading algorithm enables the optimization of data recovery from hard drives with poor performance of Head & Disk Assembly (HDA)"

- Zijian Xie, Research and Development ManagerComputer Science Labs,UK.
www.computersciencelabs.com

Hello everyone,I received my Salvation Data Compass last week and I would like to share my experience with you. When I saw the release of Salvation Data Recovery Data Compass I was a bit skeptical about the ROI of this product. Since I’ve been in Data recovery for over 4 years and I manage to do most of my job with my current equipment (PC3K ISA, HDD Duplicator etc…) After reading spec and cases study about this product I decide to go ahead and try it.

I was working on a Hitachi travelstar 80GB for over two week this drive was undetectable by any BIOS PC3K was giving time out error I couldn’t find compatible donor for Head Swap I try to fix the firmware without any changes, so by playing with it and an other power supply I finally manage to get it detect in HDD Duplicator it was actually imaging around 2% per day (Around 1.6GB/days) and I continue looking for donor. By the time I received the Data Compass the drive had 22% of the image done. I decide to take this drive as a test drive for this new toy I received. I red the manual then I plug the HDD to DC turn it up and what a great surprise with all default setting the drive was detect and I can read sector. In the DC there is a high level Data recovery software include witch is call “DR Studio”. So I opened the drive with this tools click the files I wanted to save (Document and Settings) It took around an hour to extract 10GB of data no corruption everything is clear I was more than excited I made the job I’ve been working on for 2 weeks in less then an hour!!! But since I’m skeptical by nature I told myself maybe the drive start working well because it was imaging for 2 weeks. So I plug it back to my other systems and same thing not detect by any BIOS PC3K gave timeout errors. Them this tool is Magic I was telling to my self.

Physically the DC is a USB device which look like an external hard drive with LED indicates states registry hardware (very useful). They are several switches to control drive accessibility (Power, PIO/UDMA etc…). It came package in a nice plastic briefcase witch you can carry on for in site data recovery.

The software that come with it (DC controller) is nice you can monitor the drive temperature and voltage you have knob style buttons to set different setting (readiness, retry times etc..) you can enable/disable read and or the write to the drive. There is also an option to start IBM/Hitachi drive from a res files witch I haven’t try but it’s suppose to “Bypass” Firmware problem to get access to the user data. Several options are available for the disk imaging to give you more control you can read all sector witch are “Good” then restart the image with different setting and tell him to read only sectors that haven’t been read before.

You can also use this Data Recovery Studio with DC or any of your favorite High level data recovery software.

I recommend this tools to any serious Data Recovery expert if you are trying to start in DR and you have a limited budget I recommend buying this equipment as the first thing since it will help you making a majority of job. If you are a Data Recovery expert with all the sophisticated equipment this equipment is somewhere between a good imaging system and PC3K PCI or UDMA. For less than 3000$ USD this equipment will definitely pay by itself quickly.

If you ask me to give it a note on ten for this devices I will definitely give a 9.5/10 (nothing’s perfect in this world).

If anybody else had a chance to try DC I would appreciate your comments.