Company in TX claims to have beat Sandforce Encryption

[Jared]

So they were actually able to recover it?

 

[Sam]

I probably should have "subscribed" to this thread. Sorry about the delayed response.

Yes, the controller was bad and they were able to recover the data. They do have a partnership with Sandforce which apparently gets them proprietary access or something of that nature. Maybe they split what they make off the recovery with Sandforce.

Sam

 

[Jared]

If that's so, one could argue that it's a predatory collaboration. Creating a loophole in an encryption, which otherwise makes recovery impossible, then benefiting by allowing only one company to use it and extorting high prices for a cut would be unethical to say the least. I'd bet a quick class action suit from all the people who lost data because of this and had to pay their high price would fix that.

 

[lcoughey]

Seeing that Seagate owns Sandforce, I can't imagine ACE has any more connections than what they have. And, they were unable to recover the one test case that I sent.

 

[HaQue]

So the fee was $3600? Nice to be able to recover, but basically no-one is going to fork out that.

 

[Jared]

So I'm about 1.5 years late to the thread but I do have some info about this.

About 9 months ago we got a SSD in with a Sandforce controller and were not able to get anywhere with it.
Got the suggestion to contact ACE from Serge at Deepspar. Our client ended up sending it to them and after the recovery ACE sent us a check for $360 which was 10% of the recovery fee :shock:

Sam

I'm wondering if in your case the Sandforce controller itself wasn't the actual problem. Perhaps they just have a collection of Sandforce controller SSDs in stock and they just move the controller and NAND's over for each case. I'm sure there's a good percentage of cases where the underlying issue is in the other electronics but is near impossible to figure out what exactly is going wrong.

 

[Sam]

True. Come to think of it, I never did get a technical explanation of what was wrong from ACE. From the symptoms I described to Serge at Deepspar, he is the one who suggested that the controller may be bad.
I only sent my customer ACE's contact info and then received the referral check a few weeks later.
I suspect they wouldn't have given me an explanation (or an accurate one) if I had asked. Sadly, I find this is pretty standard for many data recovery companies.
I've owned a computer repair business for 10 years and remember a few DR cases I outsourced before I acquired the skill and equipment to do physical and firmware recoveries. I would typically handle the interaction with the DR company for my customer. Out of curiosity I would ask for a technical description of what ultimately was wrong with the drive and I got answers from "we can't share any of those details" to "we can't discuss any of our methods" and so on. This seemed strange to me at the time but now I realize I was just dealing with the "shadier" companies.
I probably spend too much time on the phone with my DR customers explaining exactly what is wrong with their drive and probably sharing too many technical details about equipment and repair methodologies than they want to know. I definitely don't see a downside to it. In fact, I think it only adds to the customer's understanding of what they're paying for (or why they're paying so much!).

 

[LarrySabo]

I probably spend too much time on the phone with my DR customers explaining exactly what is wrong with their drive and probably sharing too many technical details about equipment and repair methodologies than they want to know. I definitely don't see a downside to it. In fact, I think it only adds to the customer's understanding of what they're paying for (or why they're paying so much!).

I tend to do the same but am trying to stop. I actually lost one job because the customer became concerned that I didn't use a head-unstick tool to remedy stiction and the heads were damaged in the process (or before I even took on the case).

 

[Jared]

Ditto. Only I've trained my wife to explain most of that stuff based on my quick notes I make for each case. She often gets comments from computer techs who are surprised that she can answer all their questions and even knows more about the data recovery process than they do.

 

[Amarbir[CDR-Labs]]

Ditto. Only I've trained my wife to explain most of that stuff based on my quick notes I make for each case. She often gets comments from computer techs who are surprised that she can answer all their questions and even knows more about the data recovery process than they do.

Love That ,
Nice to have a wife like that :mrgreen: .