Disk Acquisition Time Estimator

Estimation of acquisition time for a Solid State Drive

This simulator will provide you an estimate on acquiring data from a disk drive, based upon the size of the disk and the acquisition type. The source data for this estimate comes from our library of timing data for more than 2000 ewf and dd acquisitions.

NOTE: This page currently displays timing data for solid state disk drives. Hard disk drives data will be coming soon.

The simulator will provide you a time estimate for a "dd" acquisition along with timing data for the Expert Witness file format of varying buffer sizes. (The dd data is provided as it typically the Maximum sustained transfer rate of the disk drive.) Thus, you can clearly see the time impact of an EWF acquisition as compared to a straight "dd" acquisition. Further, you may compare the impact of performance of varying buffer sizes on the throughput of an EWF acquisition. If an EWF value is not displayed, it means that there is no data in the library for that buffer size.

Note that the buffer size is the number of sectors in a single read. This number multipled by the sector size gives the total bytes per read.

Just select your EWF parameters below, and the comparison chart will be automatically displayed.

• Compression - level of compression used when creating the output EWF file.
• Sector Size - The number of bytes in a sector. Larger disks are typically 4096, and smaller ones are 512 bytes.
• Output format - There are different Expert Witness formats. Please select one that you are interested in.
• Digest type - Expert witness supports hashing the output file. Options include md5, sha1 and sha256.
• Output segment size - Commonly, the output of an EWF acquisition is divided into segments. Each segment typically has a size of 1.4GB or 1.9GB. (our library does no include the larger 7.9 GB segment size at this time, so that output is not currently available.

Note that the output times are in minutes.

Use the input boxes below to configure your current hardware & software setup.