April 12th, 2008 
atola insight, data recovery, hard drives 
Dmitry Postrigan 
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This is something new to the data recovery software/equipment industry, so I have a feeling that it needs to be explained.
Basically, case management allows tracking everything that is being done to a particular hard drive. I will give a couple real world examples:
More than one person works on a particular hard drive
When a company has more than one data recovery engineer, several people may work on a single hard drive. In this case keeping track on what has been already done to a hard drive as well as proper communication between engineers can become a real challenge.
One data recovery engineer works on several hard drives at a time
Obviously, there has to be a convenient way of keeping proper records for each hard drive. Also, since most recoveries take more than just a couple of hours, the process of making notes becomes even more important.
Atola Insight solves the above mentioned issues once and for all.
Proper Case Management
Everything you do in Atola Insight gets logged into the database. Diagnostic results, SMART data, firmware modifications, even spin-up power consumption graphs are saved. Every action taken by an engineer and its result goes into the database; custom notes are supported.
Later on, when a data recovery engineer returns to that drive, Atola Insight automatically loads up the history and displays it on the main form of the application (dashboard). Database can be shared between numerous Atola Insight users; dedicated database server configuration is also supported.
Case Management finally allows data recovery engineers to concentrate on data recoveries instead of making notes.
March 27th, 2008 atola insight, data recovery, hard drives, hdd password Dmitry Postrigan no comments
We receive this question again and again: what hard drives (model numbers) are supported by Atola Insight?
I completely realize the importance of this question, but unfortunately, there is no simple answer. When we were designing Atola Insight, we’ve faced a dilemma: whether we add support for new hard drives on a per-model basis or use a different approach. We have chosen a different approach, and I will try to explain what it is.
Per-model basis means that we start working on new hard drive models as soon as we have them in our lab, which means that there is always 3-12 months delay before the software can work with these hard drives. In other words, we would be always 3-12 months “behind” the hard drive market. Maintaining the software this way is good for marketing reasons, it also simplifies research and development to a degree.
In Atola Insight, we use a better approach. When implementing firmware recovery and password removal algorithms, we try to make them as universal and intellectual as reasonably possible, thus making them able to recover and unlock all hard drives, including those that did not come out yet.
How is that possible?
Hard drive manufacturers do not change their vendor-specific command sets and firmware structures too often. On average, major changes are made once per 3-5 years, and minor changes occur once per 1-2 years. It just does not make sense for HDD manufacturers to make major changes frequently (it is an expensive and in some sense dangerous process). This allows us to create algorithms that “adapt” themselves to new hard drives as they come out, without the need for us to make any changes to Atola Insight. So, instead of “adding” new model numbers every now and then, we will be spending that precious time on improving a lot of other important things.
What does all this mean to the happy Atola Insight users? It means that Atola Insight supports all hard drives made within the last 5 years with exception of certain models. Basically, we will be publishing “unsupported yet” models rather than “supported models” (and that “unsupported yet” list will be very short). Also, in most cases, “Unsupported” hard drives can still be diagnosed and imaged with Atola Insight, so it won’t be “totally useless” until we release an update. We believe that our customers will gain maximum benefits from this approach.
SCSI/SAS/Fiber Channel hard drives
At this moment we do not have any firm plan regarding these hard drives. When we finish up all IDE, SATA and SSD hard drives, then we will think about these.
February 21st, 2008 atola insight Dmitry Postrigan 2 comments
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January 30th, 2008 atola insight Dmitry Postrigan 9 comments
We had a fully working Atola Insight software together with Atola DiskSense unit on the show, so anyone could see it in action and even try it. I am very proud that we had no program crashes and no hardware failures during the expo, thanks to Fedir, Andrey and Alexander — our top-notch developers.
It was pleasure to meet our potential customers on the show and at the seminar and I’d like to thank everyone who attended. I’ve learned a lot while listening to the feedback, and we have already made changes to our current road map according to the feedback.
Last couple of weeks my email was literally flooded with questions and now I’d like to provide the answers to the most frequent ones.
What is the price?
Preliminary price for the Atola Insight suite (includes Atola Insight software and Atola DiskSense UDMA USB 2.0 unit) is $5990. We still haven’t decided whether we will offer less expensive versions or not.
Release date
First official release is planned for the mid-April 2008. Shipping will begin in June 2008.
Where to buy
YEC International will distribute and support Atola Insight. YEC has a wide network of distributors and partners around the world.
December 28th, 2007 atola insight Dmitry Postrigan 2 comments
It’s been two days since we announced Atola Insight, and we are already virtually flooded with questions and feedback about it.
I will now go through the most common questions:
Pricing: It will be a stand-alone product with a set price; no per-use charge as seen in Repair Station/HDD Unlock Wizard. Sorry, no prices are set so far. Preliminary pricing information can be expected in February 2008. Full roadmap (2-year development plan) will be released in March 2008.
Presentation at CES 2008: I will do my best to have it taped. If that doesn’t happen for any reason, then I will at least publish my powerpoint presentation (EDIT: see comments for the download link). Also, please note that http://atola.com always contains up-to-date information about the project.
Freeware: We really want to give something that can be useful for everyone. Initially we did plan to include all diagnostics features in the freeware version of Atola Insight, but now this seems somewhat shaky since most of the diagnostic stuff moved to the Atola DiskSense USB unit. We will be discussing this more with the developers to see what we can do. The same applies to the firmware diagnostics.
Supported drives and features: Automatic unlocking (ATA-password removal) will be available for all IDE and SATA hard drives (laptop and desktop) by May 2008. Everything else will be in the product roadmap which we will be releasing in March.