WD5000M22K-24Z1LT0 potential SPI failure

[lcs]

Hi all,

First, I was to apologize if this is the wrong board for this, but I'm considering the drive as mechanical, since the issue is not related to the SSD part

I have a SSHD drive WD Black WD5000M22K-24Z1LT0 with SPI IS25LD040 (marked with E) with the following issue:
When I power on the drive, it spins up for about 2 seconds, I can hear a click and the drive powers off. Then this happens for second time (spins up, clicks, turns off) and the drive no longer spins up until I disconnect it from power and connect it again.
I can upload a video of the behaviour if it would help.

I bought another drive (marked with N) same model, same FW ver, same MDL, same LI P/N, same LC P/N, same R/N and yet a little bit different, because it came with SPI W25X40.

I tested the new drive and it works as expected. My rig is working fine and I can recognize it, format it, partition it etc..

So, I swapped the PCB from drive N to drive E, power on the drive and it spun up (kinda a success), in didn't turn off after 2 seconds and there was no click sound. BUT the drive is not being recognized by the PC. It just spins and spins and nothing ever happens.

I put my original PCB to the new drive (N) just to test it, and I saw the expected behaviour. The drive spins up, clicks, powers off, this happens again 2 times then turns off permanently. At this point I assumed the problem is within the PCB.

I did some reading and I found out even if the drives are identical, the BIOS's might no be. So I tried to swap only the SPI chip from one PCB to the other. Basically the same behaviour. With my original SPI, the drive spins up and down and with the new one it just spins. So at this point I was thinking of maybe swapping the main controller IC and pair it with the corresponding SPI. BUT the main IC being a BGA chip I parked that idea for now until I get more info on the matter if this is the right step.

My assumption at this point is that something is broken in my original SPI code.

What I've done so far is to extract the content of both SPIs and compare it. I did find major differences within the memory and I'm thinking that this is causing the drive not be recognized.

And this is where I need some help from you guys.
If I find a matching BIN for my original drive, is it possible to get it to work, or do I try to swap the main controller IC and hope for the best?
And where can I find maching firmware regarding the first option? If I raise a support ticket for WD, would they be able to send a new BIN file? Any of you guys had any interactions with them?

For some reason I cannot attach the image files, so I'm sharing a link with all files related.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
* Attaching pictures of both drives (N and E)
* Attaching picture of the PCB (Drive E)
* Attaching .BIN files from both SPIs

[fzabkar]

If a drive spins up, the ROM is OK.

I have attached the output of my ROM parsing tool. There are no problems, AFAICT. Some ROYL modules have a bad checksum, but these are uninitialised modules in the inactive ROM directory, so no problem there.

Attachments

WD5000M22K.7z

(527.08 KiB) Downloaded 471 times

[lcs]

Thanks for the info.
So in this scenario when the flash is actually OK, is my assumption correct that the issue is within the PCB or it could be a mechanical failure ?

[lcs]

Thanks for the info.
So in this scenario when the flash is actually OK, is my assumption correct that the issue is within the PCB or it could be a mechanical failure ?

[fzabkar]

I'm not a pro, so someone else would be best to advise you. However, spinning down usually points to a head or media fault.

[pepe]

it might be a problem with the SA, with donor pcb it can't read SA at all, that's why no click-spindown in that case.

[lcs]

Hi all,

So in the end I sent the drive to a repair center and sadly they coudn't do much, because the drive is SSHD and not a conventional HDD.
The service team asked to buy 2 more drives (the HDD variants) and tried to isolate the SSD component without any success. According to them there's not much info regarding the SSHD drives and they can't really recover anything since they didn't knew how the drive operates.

At this point I'm willing to send all 3 drives anywhere abroad, preferably somewhere is Europe or US (I'm located in Bulgaria), to a person who has the knowledge in this particular matter.

Can anyone here can help with this or maybe point me a to a service center?
Ofc I will pay for the service. I don't expect anyone to work out of the goodness of their heart.