PC-3000 Express

The PC-3000 Express is a six-port board that plugs into a PCI Express slot in a dedicated recovery workstation. ACE Lab describes four SATA ports and two PATA ports, with four drives connected at once, and a managed power supply for each channel with over-voltage and over-current protection. The board is sold with the PC-3000 software, which contains vendor-specific utilities for the major hard drive makers. Those utilities talk to the drive in its factory or technological mode rather than through the normal ATA command set.

The purpose is to make an unreadable drive readable. The software can read and write the flash ROM, work with service area modules and defect lists, disable damaged heads and regenerate the translator, the table that maps logical sectors to physical locations. Once the drive responds, the examiner images it with Data Extractor Express, which together with the board forms what ACE Lab calls the Express Professional System. For a forensic laboratory the Express is the bench tool for cases where a plain write-blocked image is not possible.