Forensics Cloners: Talon

The Forensic Talon cloner, by Logicube, has been available for serveral years now, and at the time of its release it was the fastest on the market.

The Pro’s:

• Its fast. Very fast. It states it can get upto 4 GB a min, and it can. If both drives are good S-ATA drives you will get those speeds.
• It has a really good logging functionality, and stores everything you need to on flash media.
  

  Talon Cloner

• It can conduct a “keyword search” across the drive during the imaging (don’t expect the functionality of EnCase or FTK).
• It has a good level of functionality, with cloning, imaging, and wiping functionality, as well as MD5 of SHA hashing, and verification methods.
• If can be used as a write blocker as well as a cloning/imaging device.
• It checks to see if data is moving over the cables correctly.

The Cons

• Its plastic and feels cheap. Its not, but it looks and feels it.
• The logging is fantastic, but it if the flash media is not present it will not image as it cannot log. i.e. if you leave the  flash media out of the kit, by mistake, you may as well not have the cloner at all.
• It images to FAT32 only, no NTFS capability, and file names are restricted to 8 characters.
• If you open the device, while the external IDE cables are connected (easy and often done) it can damage the connectors and ruin the cloner
• The verification methods, involving data lines, can some times produce false negatives. I.e. The system will sometimes state that there is an error with the imaging/cloning functionality, even though the image is good.

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