Mediatools Professional Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Media Tools Professional has long been considered by industry experts to be a valuable imaging solution for situations where drives are close to failure or already showing signs of mechanical failure. I purchased this product for my small computer repair business and have appreciated its reliable imaging capability on more than one occasion, but I do see room for improvement.
Competing solutions now exist (even free ones such as ddrescue) which can also successfully image a drive backwards, thus recovering data from mechanically failing drives using the same strategy as Media Tools Pro. But these alternatives now include additional extremely valuable advantages which almost make them a better choice in certain situations.
So, drawing from these improvements by competing products, here is what I think Media Tools Pro needs to consider including to remain a choice product for data recovery amongst professionals without a cleanroom at their disposal:
1) The option/ability to skip blocks of sectors automatically upon the encounter of a specific number of bad sectors, then return to these troubled regions for later imaging attempts. Often when imaging a drive, bad sectors are encountered in blocks rather than alone. These troubled regions of a drive can take a very long time to image, and thus it is good to have the option to skip these troubled regions and image the data which is good (or at least easier to acquire) than that which must be worked for over many hours, then return to these regions automatically later for more intensive imaging attempts AFTER the easier data has been safely copied. At least a couple other imaging products now offer this option, including the free ddrescue. While Media Tools Pro includes a so-called "skip mode", where it only attempts to read each sector a single time, it still sequentially traverses each and every sector in order and does not offer any option to jump ahead and return later.
2) The option to suppress the notification of a bad sector upon the first encounter of a bad sector on a drive. Currently a message appears the first time the program encounters a bad sector on a drive which pauses the imaging operation until user input is received, and there is no way to prevent this from happening.
3) Better control over drive operations and imaging techniques. Competing solutions provide spinup/spindown control for the drive, and Media Tools does not.
4) Better USB support. Currently Media Tools uses a Panasonic (I think it was) USB DOS driver to accomplish USB drive access, but it's hardly reliable. It would be much preferred if the devices were enumerated more reliably and USB/SATA support was somehow more certain.
There are plenty of other items for the wish list as well, but I think this sums up the major points. If Media Tools Professional could implement all of these updates, I think it would solidify its position as a choice imaging software for troubled drives amongst pros.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Mediatools Professional

Click here for more information about Mediatools Professional