The PC-3000 Express is a hardware-software solution intended for diagnosing and repairing HDDs based on SATA (Serial ATA) and PATA (IDE) interfaces for numerous vendors (Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu, Samsung, Maxtor, Quantum, IBM (HGST), HITACHI, TOSHIBA), for various capacities (from 500 MB to 8 TB) and various form factors: 3.5″ – desktop drives, 2.5″ and 1.8″ – laptop drives.

The PC-3000 Express hardware

The new powerful PC-3000 Express is a six-port tester-board which is inserted into a PCI-Express expansion slot. Six diagnostic ports are 4 SATA ports (data transfer speed up to 133 Mb/sec) and 2 PATA ports (speed up to 100 Mb/sec). The primary ports are SATA0 and SATA1 while SATA2 and SATA3 are switchable with the PATA ports (PATA0 and PATA1). You can connect four drives to the PC-3000 Express simultaneously – two SATA drives and two SATA or PATA drives, depending on your needs. Thus, you can work either with 4 SATA drives or 2 SATA and 2 PATA at the same time.

When developing the new PC-3000 Express system we used our “know-how”, all gained experience and requests from our users who work in data recovery. As a result, we have achieved a significant increase in performance and efficiency, making this professional product the best tool for the contemporary data recovery industry.

Processing modes:

• SATA x4 — UDMA133, UDMA100, UDMA66, UDMA33, PIO4, PIO3, PIO2, PIO1, PIO0
• PATA x2 – UDMA100, UDMA66, UDMA33, PIO4, PIO3, PIO2, PIO1, PIO0

All ports are separable and independent. Performance is maintained almost at the same level even when all ports have simultaneous loads. This has become possible because of efficient use of hardware buffering of the data transferred from the 4 UDMA ports through the PCI-Express 4-channel bus.

The performance for four connected HDD drives

Intelligent Power Supply Unit:

A 4-channel Power Supply Unit is used to power the HDDs which are connected to PC-3000 Express. The Power Supply Unit protects the HDDs from overvoltage and overcurrent. In case of emergency, the HDDs will be powered off automatically. Furthermore, each channel has feedback with the PC-3000 software for monitoring the stability of +5V and +12V voltage supply and informing the user about any problems in power circuits.
 
The intelligent Power Supply Unit of PC-3000 Express has the following features for advanced HDD diagnostic and troubleshooting:
 

• The oscilloscope functionality. You can get a graph visually representing the precise information about the current power status in real time. This feature allows to perform advanced HDD diagnostic and determine the cause of failure.

Power voltage oscilloscope screen after HDD start

• The Power Supply Unit is equipped with a sound speaker which signals about the PC power supply unit failure or HDD overcurrent. Triggered protection system turns off the voltage on the corresponding channel.

Resource Management of the PC-3000 Express board

One of the most important new features of the PC-3000 Express is to allow for launching of the PC-3000 utility and the Data Extractor tasks as separate OS processes. The “PC-3000 Resource manager” software makes using the new PC-3000 Express very easy and effective. The “PC-3000 Resource manager” manages port and related process activity, controls the status of the ports, checks process conditions and kills processes when it is necessary.
 
Once a process is started it can use any number of PC-3000 Express ports. For instance, four processes can be launched for each port or two processes can be launched: the first one works with three ports and the second one only with one port and so on.

Port selection process in the PC-3000 Express

PC-3000 Express Resource Manager

The PC-3000 Express Kit

• PC-3000 Express controller
• PC-USB PWR adapter
• PC-USB-TERMINAL 2 adapter
• PC-USB-TERMINAL 3 adapter
• PC-2″ adapter
• SATA-micro SATA adapter
• MX-SAFE adapter
• PC-FUJ.SATA adapter
• PC-QUANTUM adapter
• PC-SAMSUNG adapter
• PC-SEAG.SATA adapter
• PC-SEAGATE adapter
• PC-TOSH.SATA adapter
• PC-WD3.5″ adapter
• PC-WD2.5″ adapter
• ATCS, ATDA probe unlock
• USB 2.0 Defender cable
• SATA RAID edition (100 cm) cable
• UDMA80 (80 cm) flat able
• IDC10 (30 cm) cable
• MX-SAFE power cable
• SATA HDD (100 cm) power cable
• PATA HDD (85 cm) power cable
• PATA-SATA (15 cm) power adapter
• PC-3000 Express software, resource database
• User manual