Atola Blog

Atola Insight Forensic

Atola Insight Forensic 4.7 – Segmented hashing

Atola Insight Forensic 4.7 is released! This release comes with the new hashing concept which protects you from damaged target images and works in parallel with the multi-pass imaging engine. The full list of Atola Insight Forensic 4.7 changes can be found here: Atola Insight Forensic Changelog. How is segmented hashing different from regular hashing? With regular hashing, you get a single hash for the entire image. With segmented hashing, you end up with many hashes of corresponding LBA ranges (chunks) of the image. The sum of these LBA ranges represents the entire image, just not necessarily in sequential order. By validating all hashes in a set, you can still Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Atola Insight Forensic

Battery for Atola Insight Forensic

[Update 2021] Atola Battery is discontinued. Today we are introducing our new product – Atola Battery. The forensic world has been becoming more and more mobile. This is the reason why our team decided to come up with our first battery solution. It will help make your life less dependent on the availability of an electrical network when using Atola Insight Forensic. There are two main forensic use cases we see and want to emphasize. Start image acquisition even when there is no electrical power. Protect working DiskSense unit from power loss. Technical specifications Work time: 3 hours 30 minutes, when imaging source HDD to target HDD with MD5 calculation Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Atola Insight Forensic

Atola Insight Forensic 4.6 – Scripting

Today we are releasing Atola Insight Forensic 4.6. The killer feature is AtolaScript language and the script execution engine. Now Atola Insight empowers you to perform the most sophisticated tasks by combining over 50 commands the way you want. Those include custom ATA commands, various commands to scan throughout the entire media to find specific data, read/write tests, and many others. Full Atola Insight Forensic 4.6 change log is available here: Changelog. Forensic Scripting AtolaScript language is probably the simplest one you have ever seen. Scripts consist of one line instructions without semicolons. Conditions (if) as well as while, for, foreach loops are available in C# syntax. It is easy to run multiple Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Atola Insight Forensic

Network database setup in Atola Insight Forensic

Atola Insight Forensic enables working with remote database shared between many users. Here is the scenario how to setup such a network database and connect different PCs with Atola Insight to it. 1. Pre-install SQL Server 2012 or 2014 on the network server PC 2. Launch Atola Insight Forensic on the user PC 3. Navigate to Insight -> Database Connection Settings from the top menu A. Select Server type: Remote B. Specify network server name, select SQL server instance and database names C. Enter SQL server login and password as shown in the picture below: 4. Click OK and re-launch Atola Insight Forensic on the user PC. 5. It will Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Customer relations

Q&A during Enfuse and Techno Security conferences

We were exhibiting with Atola Insight Forensic at Enfuse and Techno Security conferences and received plenty of questions from people visiting our booth. Some of these questions were repeatedly asked, so sharing them and their corresponding answers in this blog makes sense. We do hope you find the information provided here helpful! What is the maximum imaging speed? You can always observe an actual imaging performance of 30 GB/min in Atola Insight Forensic v4.5 with a couple of Samsung 850 Pro solid-state drives used as source and target devices. Why is Atola Insight Forensic better than competing products? We produce the only solution that is specifically designed to support damaged media. Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Atola Insight Forensic

Atola Insight Forensic 4.5 release

Atola Insight Forensic 4.5 is released! We put a great deal of effort on implementing the new imaging engine to improve image acquisition stability and performance at the same time. There are quite many changes to other parts of the product as well. In total, our internal issue tracking system has a record number of almost 250 tasks completed for 4.5 release. Full Atola Insight Forensic 4.5 change log is available here: Version Log. Improved performance Atola Insight 4.5 benchmarks show speed-up of core disk operations (all numbers are MB/s): Atola Insight Forensic 4.5 Atola Insight Forensic 4.4 Imaging to SATA target 500 418 Imaging to raw image file (1Gb Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Atola Insight Forensic

Imaging speed improvements preannounced in Atola Insight Forensic 4.5

We would like to share the newest speed achieved by the revamped Imaging engine. It will be shipped within 4.5 software update in May. Total imaging performance was significantly improved during last 4 months. Just take a look at 503MB/s imaging speed in the screenshot below. It is more than 30 GB per minute.   The new imaging engine empowers you to clone 256GB Samsung 850 Pro just in 8.5 minutes!

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Atola Insight Forensic

Atola Insight 4.4: 10Gbit Ethernet, SAS, M.2 extensions

Atola Insight Forensic 4.4 is ready for download now! The newest version got 3 new extension modules supported, 130+ improvements and bug fixes. In particular, we have been working really hard on the major new features addressed below. Full Atola Insight Forensic 4.4 change log is available here: Changelog. SAS extension module SAS extension module was designed to diagnose SAS drives and acquire images from them. It is really easy in use. As any other extension module, it should be plugged in the Extension port located on the DiskSense unit. Then you connect a SAS drive to it and simply start working. Atola Insight Forensic 4.4 supports damaged SAS drives, Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Atola Insight Forensic

How to resolve DiskSense / HASP connection issues

DiskSense hardware system includes an internal HASP USB dongle. It contains unique activation and subscription information. Having more than one DiskSense system in your network may result in HASP-related conflicts. These conflicts usually manifest as “Too many connections” or “Cannot located DiskSense unit” errors. The issue is caused by behavior of the HASP discovery system which by default picks a random HASP dongle on the network. In other words, one Atola Insight Forensic instance may establish the connection with one DiskSense system, however it will “use” the HASP dongle of another (random) system available on the network. How to resolve multiple HASP connection issues We would like to share the Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago
Atola Insight Forensic

Atola Insight Forensic 4.3 with Apple SSD support

We thank you all for supporting our product and proudly present Atola Insight Forensic 4.3 release. Record 170 fixes and improvements included in the new version. So hurry up to update your software! Several major changes we want to focus your attention on are described below. The full list of Atola Insight Forensic 4.3 changes can be found here: Atola Insight Forensic Changelog. Apple PCIe SSD support Insight 4.3 is the first version that is able to work with the newest PCIe SSDs from Apple MacBooks (2013 – current models). It can be made via new Atola adapter pluggable in the Extension port which is located on the DiskSense unit’s side Read more…

By Vitaliy Mokosiy, ago