What makes a Forensic workstation?

• Write Blockers
  (Forensic Universal Bridge) Digital forensic investigators and examiners need the ability to quickly image many different types of suspect drives in their lab through a reliable, forensically-sound product. Write blockers are a specialised type of disk controller that allows read-only access to computer hard drives without the risk of contaminating the evidence.
  
  Novatech Forensic workstations use integrated Tableau bridges which support write blocked acquisitions of up to nine different types of storage media, from modern PCIe drives to IDE HDDs. Allowing you to capture the image to the ample workstation storage where it can be worked on without risk.
• RAID arrays and Storage  Forensics involves a great deal of not only working with large drive images but also generating relational databases of the information that is being analysed. This indexing process utilises both high-speed sequential reads, as the image is being analysed, and data is being written randomly to the DBs.
  
  It is obvious then that correct drive choices and layouts are increasingly important with these sort of workloads, all Novatech Forensic Workstations take this into account and have both capacity arrays and SSD arrays to deal with both requirements efficiently.
• CPU Modern forensics software requires a combination of compute capabilities. Both the indexing and imaging processes have strong compute needs, processing large amounts of data in short periods. In designing these systems, we have leveraged the newest architectures from both AMD and Intel, whether this is the raw power and core count of AMD's EPYC platform or a pair of Intel's 12 core Gold 5118s working in unison, these units provide the raw horsepower needed to churn the vast amounts of data a modern forensics investigation requires.
• GPU While the CPUs provide a source of computational power that enables these workstations to deal with large quantities of data and searches, the hashing and algorithms required for breaking passwords and other brute force tasks are better served by larger amounts of simpler cores such as those found in GPUs. Thus our analysis and password accelerator workstations use the latest NVidia RTX GPUS to enable parallel processing via their large CUDA core counts.