PC-3000 SSD. How to choose the correct loader for SM2258XT/SM2259XT/XT2

Posted on 10/13/2023 by ACELab team

Hello everyone!

ACE Lab Technical Support department gets a lot of requests from your side about modern Solid State Drives based on such popular SMI controllers as SM2258XT, SM2259XT, SM2259XT2. All these controllers are fully supported in PC-3000 UDMA, Express and Portable III starting from 2020-2021, and now if you got one of these controllers in your target drive, we can try to guide you how to recover it.

Anyway, a huge number of requests from customer side makes us to write this article which could be a handy instruction – how to properly work with these drives and how we can initialize the correct loader.

Before we start, a short guide about the LOADER – what is that, and who is guilty?!

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PC-3000 HDD. Western Digital 4F ROM Module recovery mode

Posted on 08/07/2023 by ACELab team

Hello Friends! All of you already know that the PC-3000 can recover ROM from old Western Digital Marvell drives with External (in separate chip) and Internal (in MCU) ROM.  However, it was a problem to recover ROM from newer families, like HubbleLT, FBLite or Shrek due to their special ROM structure which includes some unique information in 4F ROM module.

In this article we are going to discuss how to recover ROM from Service Area for such drives using a new PC-3000 v7.3 feature – ROM module 4F recovery.

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Posted in Articles, PC-3000 HDD, Video | 4 Comments

PC-3000 Flash 8.2.x – adding unsupported chip ID into the software

Posted on 07/24/2023 by ACELab team

Hey guys!

ACE Lab engineers regularly add new NAND memory chips into the PC-3000 Flash software database. Updates with the new XORs, NAND ID’s, ECC and dynamic XORs appears in Flash weekly. If our customer faced with the unsupported XOR or unknown chip ID, we’re trying our best to communicate with the customer and urgently add the required resources via remote control.

 

We are strongly recommending to contact ACE Lab TS because every modern unknown NAND chip has a lot of additional reading parameters which directly influence the data read quality and integrity.

Anyway, our developers add a new additional feature in the upcoming PC-3000 Flash 8.2.x software update which allows adding unknown memory chip automatically with 100% parameters matching result.

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Digital Forensics: PC-3000 SSD – how to bypass the TRIM

Posted on 06/28/2023 by ACELab team

Hey there!

In this article we are going to speak about the TRIM command which appears in the beginning of SSD era (around 14 years ago) and become a native feature in all existing Solid State Drives.

So, what is that and how’s it working?

TRIM – is an internal hardware SSD command which works in pair with Operating System. By default, TRIM was fully integrated in all OS starting from Windows Vista SP1, Windows 7 and MacOS X 10.6 (approximately from 2009-2010).

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Posted in Data Extractor | 24 Comments

PC-3000 SSD Systems. The List of Supported SSDs (regularly updated, ver. 3.3.6)

Posted on 06/08/2023 by ACELab team

Hello friends!

The ACE Lab developers constantly research drives, which results in a rapid expansion of the Support List for most of the modern SSDs. So with the PC-3000 Systems that support Solid State Drives, you will always be on the cutting edge of
data recovery technology!

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PC-3000. Best PC configuration for ACE Lab products in 2023

Posted on 02/03/2023 by ACELab team

Recently, users have been asking about the most comfortable hardware configuration for using PC-3000 Flash, PC-3000 Express or PC-3000 UDMA-E. A lot of engineers are still working on computers with Core i5 2400 and 4GB of RAM, but this configuration is outdated and if you want to recover huge NAND Flash cases with 64-512Gb capacity, or working with complicated RAID configuration, you should get faster Personal Computer. We decided to compile a short list of configurations of different price categories, which should be enough for any complicated case.

 

Intel CPU based on latest architectures like Haswell, Skylake, Coffee Lake provide a high performance. At the same time in 2017 new generation of AMD CPU has been released. New AMD ZEN micro-architecture become very powerful and it allows to work even with the most complicated cases like Flash, HDD and RAID recovery. We strongly recommend to pay attention to Ryzen CPUs – they become much better than previous generation – AMD FX which were not so good

Ryzen 2 from 2019 become a real surprise for all – AMD boost the performance for 20-25% in compare with Ryzen 2017! That’s why ACELab also recommend to pay attention on Ryzen 2d GEN 3xxx family and 3d GEN 5xxx – it’s a really great 7nm CPU.

Finally, we can compare the models of CPU like:

  • Intel Celeron (2 cores / 2 thread) = AMD Athlon (2 cores / 4 thread) LOW-END
  • Intel Pentium (2 cores / 4 thread) = AMD Ryzen 3  (4 cores / 4 thread)  LOW-MID
  • Intel Core i3 (4 cores / 8 thread) = AMD Ryzen 5  (4 cores / 8 thread) MIDDLE-END
  • Intel Core i5 (6 cores / 12 thread) = AMD Ryzen 5 (6 cores / 12 thread) PERFOMANCE
  • Intel Core i7 (16 cores / 24 thread) = AMD Ryzen 7  (8 cores / 16 thread) HIGH-END
  • Intel Core i9 (20 cores /32 thread) = AMD Ryzen 9  (16 cores / 32 thread) = I SAW YOU IN MY DREAM

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Posted in Articles, Data Extractor, PC-3000 Flash, PC-3000 HDD, PC-3000 SSD | Tagged , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

PC-3000 HDD. How to fix the Second Level Translator (T2) in the PC-3000 7.2 Software Version

Posted on 12/22/2022 by ACELab team

Hello Friends! As you know, the Second Level Translator (T2) is a very critical FW part which affects HDD normal work and data access. Previously, if the T2 was damaged, we  had to use RAW recovery in PBA mode in order to get access to the files. In the PC-3000 Software Version 7.2.x, we can do more to recover the T2 and get data access. Let us review this new PC-3000 feature in the article below. Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, PC-3000 HDD | 5 Comments

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 →

Posted in Articles, Data Extractor, PC-3000 SSD | 2 Comments

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.

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Posted in Data Extractor, PC-3000 HDD | 8 Comments