PC-3000 Express
Overview
The PC-3000 Express is a hardware-software solution intended for diagnosing, repairing and recovering data from damaged HDDs based on SATA (Serial ATA) and PATA (IDE) interfaces for numerous vendors (Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu, Samsung, Maxtor, Quantum, IBM (HGST), HITACHI, TOSHIBA), for various capacities (from 500 MB to 6 TB) and various form factors: 3.5" - desktop drives, 2.5" and 1.8" - laptop drives. The PC-3000 Express coupled with the Data Extractor Express forms the PC-3000 Express Professional System that enables you to recover data from SATA, and PATA (IDE) HDDs. If you wish to repair these HDDs, you need only the PC-3000 Express, and for data recovery you need both the PC-3000 Express and the Data Extractor Express.
Resource Management of the Express board
One of the most important new features of the PC-3000 Express is to allow for launching of the PC-3000 utility and the Data Extractor tasks as separate OS processes. The “PC-3000 Resource manager” software makes using the new PC-3000 Express very easy and effective. The “PC-3000 Resource manager” manages port and related process activity, controls the status of the ports, checks process conditions and kills processes when it is necessary.
Once a process is started it can use any number of PC-3000 Express ports. For instance, four processes can be launched for each port or two processes can be launched: the first one works with three ports and the second one only with one port and so on
The PC-3000 Express Kit
PC-3000 Express controller
PC-USB-TERMINAL adapter
PC-2″ adapter
SATA- micro SATA adapter
MX-SAFE adapter
PC-FUJ.SATA adapter
PC-QUANTUM adapter
PC-SAMSUNG adapter
PC-SEAG.SATA adapter
PC-SEAGATE adapter
PC-TOSH.SATA adapter
ATCS, ATDA probe unlock
USB 2.0 Defender cable
SATA RAID edition (80 cm) cable
UDMA80 (80 cm) flat able
IDC10 (30 cm) cable
MX-SAFE power cable
SATA HDD (80 cm) power cable
PATA HDD (70 cm) power cable
PATA-SATA (10 cm) power adapter
PC-3000 Express software, resource database
User manual
PC-3000 UDMA Kit
Recommended PC configuration:
The PC-3000 Express hardware
The new powerful PC-3000 Express is a six-port tester-board which is inserted into a PCI-Express expansion slot. Six diagnostic ports are 4 SATA ports (data transfer speed up to 133 Mb/sec) and 2 PATA ports (speed up to 100 Mb/sec). The primary ports are SATA0 and SATA1 while SATA2 and SATA3 are switchable with the PATA ports (PATA0 and PATA1). You can connect four drives to the PC-3000 Express simultaneously – two SATA drives and two SATA or PATA drives, depending on your needs. Thus, you can work either with 4 SATA drives or 2 SATA and 2 PATA at the same time.
When developing the new PC-3000 Express system we used our “know-how”, all gained experience and requests from our users who work in data recovery. As a result, we have achieved a significant increase in performance and efficiency, making this professional product the best tool for the contemporary data recovery industry.
Technological utilities
All specialized PC-3000 utilities are capable of performing the following actions:
How to use the PC-3000 Express to repair HDDs?
The PC-3000 provides a wide range of functions for repairing HDDs. It enables the user to overwrite FLASH ROM, to switch off damaged magnetic heads, to detect and exclude damage in the HDD service area, to recalculate and overwrite service modules, to regenerate the translation system, to clean and reset S.M.A.R.T. logs and tables, to detect bad areas in magnetic surfaces and to exclude them from the HDD working area. Afterward, identification parameters are corrected (including serial number, model, capacity, etc.)
There are 5 main HDD repair stages:- HDD PCB is diagnosed. It helps to evaluate how difficult it is to repair this HDD and if it is worth doing it. Board can be repaired or substituted by another board taken from an HDD donor. Flash ROM is checked for integrity and version correspondence. If necessary, they are rewritten from the PC-3000 resource database.
- Magnetic heads are checked, bad heads are disabled.
- HDD service area is diagnosed. Service information modules are checked on all copies. Damaged modules are recovered or overwritten in accordance with reference data. Some service modules are cleaned and logs are reset. Calibration is launched for those HDDs where it is possible to do it.
- Searching the bad sectors and tracks on HDD surfaces and hiding them. In case of seriously damaged surface and numerous bad sectors, this surface area is disabled. If defects are minor and local, separate areas can be switched off or defects can be hidden by using an HDD backup zone, HDD capacity remains the same. For some drives SelfScan procedure can be launched.
- Available HDD logical space is determined. Max LBA parameters, model name, serial number, etc. are formed.