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StableBit Scanner
An innovative disk surface scanner, disk health monitor and file recovery system.
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Q. What does the StableBit Scanner do exactly to monitor the health of my hard drives?
The StableBit Scanner monitors and checks your hard drives in 3 ways:
- Periodic automatic physical surface scans (see User Manual). This makes sure that every bit on all of your disks is readable.
- Checking with the on-disk S.M.A.R.T. system for 24-hour disk failure prediction and for any suspicious attributes that could indicate mechanical drive trouble (see User Manual).
- Periodic file system scans to make sure that the file system metadata is not corrupt (see User Manual).
Automatic surface scans can be scheduled or turned off entirely at your discretion.
#3 is only available on StableBit Scanner v.2.X.
Q. What happens if physical surface damage is found, does the StableBit Scanner perform data recovery?
Once physical surface damage is found a critical Windows Home Server console alert is issued and you have the option of entering the file recovery interface.
File recovery will let you start a data structure scan over the entire disk. This will let you know what files (and other data structures) were damaged as a result of the unreadable sectors on your disk.
Once the damaged files are identified, you have the option of recovering those files. File recovery works by taking the known good blocks of a damaged file and writing them out to a new location. Then, optionally, multiple attempts will be made to read the unreadable sectors using various head positioning profiles.
File recovery only works on a NTFS file that's not compressed or encrypted.
Alternate NTFS data streams are not recovered.
Q. Does the StableBit Scanner put my data at risk by writing to my hard disk at any point?
No. All operations that the StableBit Scanner performs are read only, except writing out your recovered file. You choose the output location of the recovered file, which should be on a separate disk.
Q. What is cloud integration, does it put any of my data or information about my system on the Internet?
Cloud integration involves:
- S.M.A.R.T. Interpretation. For this feature, a web service is queried at bitflock.com with your hard disk serial number and firmware to retrieve information about how to process S.M.A.R.T. data for your disk (see User Manual). No information about your disk is stored or made public.
- USB pass-through. This is very similar to point #1. A web service is queried at bitflock.com with your USB disk's hardware IDs in order to get information on how to best talk to it through the USB bridge chip. Once again, no information about your disk is stored or made public.
- Drive reliability information (including SSD endurance) is queried from our database based on your drive model. The reliability information comes from manufacturer provided specification.
Q. What is Direct I/O, does it read or write to the disk in an unsafe way?
No, Direct I/O simply is the ability to send commands directly to the disk, and so Direct I/O is not used to read or write data on the disk. It's used to identify the disk and to retrieve S.M.A.R.T. data.
Q. I have another question, can you help me out?
Sure, just fill out a simple contact form and we'll get back to you.