This site has moved to www.hddsuperclone.com
HDDSuperClone - An advanced Linux based hard drive cloning/imaging tool
Up until now, gnu ddrescue has been widely known to be the best free hard drive cloning tool for failing hard drives. It is open source and cross platform. But being cross platform has some limitations, as there are some specialized ways for Linux to send commands to a drive that have some advantages over standard techniques. So I would like to introduce HDDSuperClone, which is not open source and only works on Linux. There is a free version, and also a more advanced PRO version available for purchase.
The free version uses SCSI passthrough commands to communicate with the device. This offers more feedback than traditional communication methods, and it can be possible to detect when a drive is no longer responding properly. Ddrescue can have trouble knowing when a drive is no longer responding as the OS just reports a read error with no way to tell what is wrong.
The PRO version has the ability to use direct I/O for IDE and SATA connected drives, along with some other advanced features.
Another feature of HDDSuperClone is that it has an advanced self learning head skipping algorithm that will attempt to skip out of a bad head in about 7 bad reads. This can make getting the data from the good heads much faster. Hardware imagers can “turn off” a head and only read data from the good heads which is ideal, but that requires using special vendor specific commands. The head skipping algorithm of HDDSuperClone is about as close as one can hope to get to that without special commands.
HDDSuperClone can import and export ddrescue map (log) files, so it you can switch between the two if needed.
Please report any bugs or issues, and also feel free to report any success stories.