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When I first read about RapidSpar, I thought it was little more than a simple duplicator with ddrescue onboard. I couldn't have been more wrong.

RapidSpar offers drive-to-drive cloning (imaging requires Data Acquisition Add-on) and some automated firmware fixes. But much more remarkable was its ability to recover files and folders from unmountable disks (without having to clone first) via the Windows-based RapidSpar Assistant. This was a MASSIVE improvement over trying to clone an entire failing drive just to recover a relatively small number of desired files.

For this comparison, I used a non-mounting (under Linux, OS X, and Windows) and sporadically clicking () Hitachi Travelstar 5K750-500 HTS547550A9E384, a 2.5" 500GB SATA HDD. It was pulled from a MacBook Pro and originally formatted HFS+ (unencrypted, but wrapped in a CoreStorage volume). DeepSpar's Rapid Drive Tester (RDT) reported 4800 UNC errors. ddrescue, HDDSuperClone, and Rapidspar were all run (in that order) with their default settings. I had to clone rather than image with the Rapidspar, since the Data Acquisition Add-on is not available on the demo unit. RapidSpar Assistant was also used to bypass the need for cloning altogether, as explained above and detailed below.

ddrescue

• Run time: 6h8m51s
• Total recovered: 153937 directories, 619737 files
• Operating environment: OS X 10.9.5
• Occassional loud clicking while imaging

HDDSuperClone

• Run time: 8h30m24s
• Total recovered: 153937 directories, 619737 files
• Operating environment: Linux Mint 18
• Frequent loud clicking while imaging

RapidSpar (in cloning mode)

• Run time: 3h17m15s
• Total recovered: 153941 directories, 619758 files
• Operating environment: N/A
• Had to run RapidNebula (remote diagnostics and automatic firmware fixes/optimizations) before cloning (a demo restriction - normally not required apparently), but that might have been what fixed the loud clicking noise, since it disappeared for good within a few moments.

RapidSpar Assistant

• Run time: 4m27s (from unmountable drive to complete file system being available for file/folder recovery)
• Total recovered: RapidSpar Assistant reported processing 650,278 file names (not all of which would necessarily be recoverable or valid). Tested recovery by successfully copying commonly requested data.
• Operating environment: Windows 7
• No clicking while recovering data

Notes:

• ddrescue and HDDSuperClone images would not mount in Linux (despite specifying offset, sizelimit, etc) or OS X (without first repairing via DiskWarrior), but did mount in Windows 10 via OSFMount and MacDrive 10 (Apple's own read-only HFS+ driver proved too buggy, causing BSODs when attempting to list image contents via Beyond Compare, tree for Windows, etc).
• After cloning, the Rapidspar target drive was plugged into a Mac (with hardware write blocker); all three volumes (EFI, Macintosh HD, and Recovery HD) appeared in diskutil and Macintosh HD automatically mounted normally in the Finder.

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