Seagate SAS SSD (ST200FM0053) - how to get diagnostic mode ?

[petar_b]

Dear gurus,

I can enter into diagnostic menu of regular Seagate SATA drive and do ctrl-l or ctrl-a to see details, e.g. Seagate Momentus 7200.4

However I need to do the same with Seagate ST200FM0053or ST200FM0073 and I can't get into diagnostic menu. I spent days trying different baud rates, RX/TX pins but nothing works. It looks like that this port is not serial port at all, or speks some very different language. I also noticed that this little ssd has additional unknown port on the front side that might be some diagnostic port instead.

Does anyone have any pin layout or details on this SAS SSD or any other Seagate similar SSD that might help me ?

Thanks in advance

[fzabkar]

Detailed photos of both sides of the PCB might help. Perhaps there are safe mode shorting points on the PCB?

[petar_b]

Detailed photos of both sides of the PCB might help. Perhaps there are safe mode shorting points on the PCB?

Hereby the images. I don't see any jumpers; and I don't see serial controller chip next to serial interface, unless it's in controller itself. On the first slide you can see unknown front connector.

Attachments

[fzabkar]

I can't see the IC markings in your photos. Do you have a CCD scanner (not CIS)?

In the absence of any better methods, would it make sense to disable the power to the NAND array? Would this cause the SSD to output a message to the terminal port? If this approach is of interest to you, we would need to identify the buck regulator ICs and measure their outputs. Then we could locate the corresponding bypass capacitors at the NANDs.

[petar_b]

Nah, markings on IC are invisible; black on black, and it's so small that best camera zoom can't help and certainly not readable by eye.

Referring to your proposal - I can't do it, multimeter pins are too big and board is too tiny and my hands are too big LOL - not that I care about damaging SSD, it's 70% of life, so can't be used for cachecade (what I use them for).

I will leave this topic sit here, maybe someone from future has some schematics or service manual comes across and gives a hint.

Thanks for your effort.

[scratchy]

What sort of multimeter probes do you have? Anyway, You can get good quality fine tipped probes from farnell.

[petar_b]

So does anyone know what is this connector port on the opposite side of the sas data connector ? it looks like micro hdmi or something; I wonder is it diagnostics or some kind of expansion connector for SSD....

[csava]

That's the connector for the data center storage sequence.