As some of you may remember, I have written about data recovery tasks in previous posts. In this post, I want to talk about the hardware that I have used, and mention some limitations when choosing and using particular hardware. Actually, the basic requirements of a data recovery machine for the home lab are similar to those requirements of a standard PC. It doesn’t need to be a very powerful gaming PC – just needs to be able to connect disk drives of all sorts, and have storage capacity – but we will go through this.
So what can we do with this data recovery machine in the home lab? We should establish this so that we can adjust our requirements. Typically, we would be dealing with recovering data from a disk or data storage device, that has either suffered from a virus corruption, possible logical issues like reformatting and/or the usual thing that has happened after an update has gone wrong, and the disk no longer boots. We won’t necessarily be involved with the physical or electronic repair of a spinning disk drive that involves removing platters, replacing heads, or head amplifiers – but we may deal with a disk that has some unreadable sectors. Now that we know what this machine will be used for, then we look at the requirements.
The CPU – this is the heart of the machine. Any recent CPU can be used – it could be from Intel or AMD. Although not absolutely essential, I recommend that the CPU have internal graphics. I am currently using an AMD Ryzen 5 3400G, but have successfully used an AMD Athlon II X3 420e for many years, then later, an Intel Pentium G4560. The old Athlon II X3 420e didn’t have internal graphics though, so it was paired with a low end video card. I preferred at that time to use a fan-less video card, since the graphics requirements are quite low, and being fan-less would mean that it uses less power and generates less noise, especially if the machine is running for many hours (days) at a time.
The Motherboard – this is the body of the machine, where all the peripherals connects to. Ideally, we should be able to install at least 8GB of ram, and preferably 16GB – my Ryzen has 16GB. It should have a number of Sata ports – depending on how many disk drives we want to connect at the same time. It could also have onboard M.2 sockets – one or two – but this is also not critical as we can get away with using adapters – which I will mention later. There should be a number of USB ports, but most of the recent motherboards already have these anyway.
The Case – this is the box that everything will be installed in. I would suggest something like a mid-tower case with a number of 5.25″ front bays. Any power supply should be sufficient as long as you have enough Molex or Sata power connectors to suit the number of drives you want to run at the same time.
Ok – that’s it, or is it? I didn’t mention IDE disks, did I? No, but that is because only the very old PC’s use IDE disk drives. We can cater for these by using external disk cases, that can take an IDE disk, and plug into a USB port, or even a Firewire port.
Now we look at some limitations of the motherboards and how I overcame them. The motherboard might have M.2 and Sata ports. One great example is the MSI Z270 Krait Gaming that I had paired with an Intel Pentium G4560. It had internal graphics which was great. It also had two M.2 slots that were NVMe compatible – which was really handy when I was copying and extending a NVMe disk for my brother’s Lenovo laptop.
One of the problems with using M.2 slots is that they do take away from your Sata ports depending on what you install into the M.2 slots. Here is a clip from the Krait Gaming manual.
From the table, we can see that installing a Sata device into M2_1 would disable Sata1 and installing a Sata device into M2_2 would disable Sata5, but then installing two NVMe devices into the M.2 slots would disable Sata5 and Sata6. Effectively this means that using one Sata M.2 device will limit your Sata ports to 5 in total – which in reality is quite reasonable. So I had used a 240GB M.2 Sata SSD into port M2_2 with that motherboard and was still able to use 5 Sata ports.
One thing I should note, is that the motherboard sata ports are not meant to be plugged and unplugged a lot. In fact most of the manufacturer specifications for the Sata socket itself say that its durability is quite low at max. mating cycles = 50. I got around this limitation by using a hot-swap Sata disk chassis. There are quite a few of these around, but the one I am using, was bought many years ago. It was a Norco SS-500 5 Bay Sata/SAS Hot Swap Rack Module.
This rack module comes with trays that will accept either 3.5″ Sata disks or 2.5″ Sata disks. It is powered by two Molex connectors. The rack module will use up 3x 5.25″ external case bays – one of the reasons why I suggested a mid-tower case. One of my initial problems encountered with this rack module, was that my case had bay guides and my rack module didn’t like that, so I had to bend the thin metal guides out of the way so that I could install the rack module. An alternative would be the Norco SS-400, which is 4 bays, but allows it to install into cases where the bay guides cannot be bent out of the way.
The case I used is quite an old one. It was a Cooler Master 334U and looks like this.
My Norco SS-500 was installed in the top three 5.25″ bays. The case could handle a full size ATX motherboard so was fully compatible. With the MSI Z270 Krait Gaming, I could have an internal M.2 SSD and be able to connect to five sata disks. Each Sata disk would be installed into a tray, then I would install each tray as needed. I might have a scratch disk, i.e. a disk that can be written to for either taking an image or for temporary usage. I could have a bulk storage disk, like a 4-8TB disk to keep disk images on and other disks if I want to do disk-to-disk copying/imaging.
Earlier this year, I decided to upgrade my CPU/Motherboard combination to make my data recovery machine into a more general purpose machine. I bought an AMD Ryzen 5 3400G cpu that has integrated graphics (Radeon Vega 11) and paired it with a MSI B450-A PRO MAX motherboard. The motherboard comes with 6x Sata ports and 1x M.2 slot. Unfortunately when the M.2 slot is used, it disables Sata5 and Sata6. Then I was limited to 4 Sata ports if I used my M.2 slot.
To fix this, I decided to do two things. I would get from ebay, a couple of disk adapters, those that take a M.2 device and convert it to a 2.5″ Sata disk. Then in addition, I would get a Silverstone FS202B 3.5″ to 2.5″ Hot Swap Drive Bay.
The Silverstone FS202B could then be installed into one of the front 3.5″ bays, and give me access to the full six Sata slots. It has a trayless design, and can handle two 2.5″ disks, but I would only use one for the time being. I can use this in conjunction with the M.2 to Sata adapters for booting my operating system that I will mention in a later post.
An alternative to the Norco SS-500 in a trayless design would be the Icy Box IB-565SSK. The Icy Box will only take 3.5″ drives, so to use a 2.5″ would require a 2.5″ to 3.5″ bay converter or caddy. However, in the future, I might move towards getting a rack module that is trayless like the Norco SS-400 which gives me 4x 3.5″ slots, then will be able to use both of the FS202B 2.5″ drive slots. If I ever need to connect more than two 2.5″ drives, I can then use a converter.
Newer case styles have moved towards reducing the number of front 5.25″ bays. Many of the lower cost cases have only two bays, so a suitable alternative is something like the StarTech 3-Bay Hot Swap Backplane that fits into two bays. To get more front bays, you will need to look at larger and more expensive cases.
I haven’t mentioned a hardware write blocker. This data recovery machine is for a home lab, but depending on your budget, you can get a write blocker. Usually a write blocker is a USB connected device that allows connection of Sata/SAS disks or even IDE disks such that any writes to the disk are disabled/blocked. We would definitely use a write blocker if we wanted to make a proper forensic image that is needed for legal reasons.
For a home lab, a hardware write blocker is not necessary – but if what we were doing is needed in court, then a write blocker is a must – along with proper chain of evidence documentation. If you wish to get a write blocker, you should use one that is approved and tested.
So that is almost it – oh, one more thing, you can also get an Orico 1106SS that is a 5.25″ to 3.5″ Sata Hot Swap Rack – also trayless, allows you to use a spare 5.25″ front bay. There are also modules that convert mSata to Sata. It all depends on what devices you want to read or recover from. The options for the drive configurations are numerous. If you are mainly working on laptop data recovery, then you need fewer 3.5″ slots. The bare minimum would be three – an operating system drive, the source disk, and the target disk. Once the imaging has been done, swap out the source disk and put it away, since all work will be done on the target disk, or a scratch disk that is inserted afterwards.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this post – that discusses some of the requirements of a data recovery machine, which basically summarizes down to how many concurrent disk devices you want to use. You can make do with less, but that means moving data around. One thing I didn’t mention was network storage – instead of copying disk images to another disk, you could use network storage – I do have that as well, but found network storage to be a lot slower than physical disk to disk. If I want to make an image of a 2TB disk, then I need to be able to store that 2TB disk image somewhere, and usually is to a bulk storage disk like a 4TB or larger disk. Once I have the disk image, then I like to copy the image back to a physical disk after removing the original source disk, so it helps to have a number of scratch disks available whose contents you don’t care about, once the job is done.
R.IT 
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