I'll accept that you are probably referring only to that being a reasonable cost for the task, and I might agree with that, but you are then ignoring a few influential circumstances here. Now, I'm not interested in debating this so hopefully I won't spawn a debate here, but I'll just offer you some food for thought from my perspective ...

Consider that Seagate sold me a drive that lasted fewer than 100hrs spread over about 1.5 years before failing and now they want me to pay them $600 (about 6x what the drive originally cost) to recover the two or three files that I didn't have backed up.

Consider that the drive has a 5 year warranty (warranty does not include data recovery). Is it reasonable to expect a drive with a 5 year warranty to last at least 5 years? I think so.

Consider that I might send it back for replacement under warranty if I was was 100% certain I will not ever want to recover any of the data - but I'm not. I can live without the 2-3 files I know I didn't back-up but I am not 100% certain I missed something else.

So Seagate gets away with selling defective merchandise and does not have to honor the warranty OR customers pay $600 ransom to recover data Seagate was responsible for losing OR Seagate honors the warranty, sends out a replacement drive to customers. Who will use that replacement? Only someone who wants to give Seagate $600 in a few months. Reasonable?

I understand your pain but applying the blame game doesn't work.
Only one body is responsible for the data and its not the manufacturer and it has always been that way.

At least in this sentence you seem to understand that manufacturing and selling a hard drive is unrelated to providing data recovery service.
Seagate doesn't care if you pay them or not. They sold you a hard drive without any data on it, they are more than happy to give you another one without data on it. Here you have tried to blend two distinct businesses again. Also you are asking that we believe you played no part in the failure, we are giving you that even though we know a big percentage of drive failures are caused by mishandling or accidents. It doesn't really matter what happened though, because Seagate sold you a storage device, not data protection services.
This is not reasonable or based in logic of any sort. Warranties exist because the potential for failure exist. The warranty is there to help make sales, if you know the product will be replaced if it fails then you might consider buying that one, not the one with less or no warranty. Automobiles fail under warranty ALL THE TIME. Sane people do not assume it will never need warranty service because it has a warranty.
Doesn't sound like Seagate's problem at all.
No, all manufacturers experience defects, failures, and returns, as well as product abuse, not just Seagate. You know this, but want to pretend it isn't so because you think it helps your argument. And Seagate does have to honor their warranty, you made another false claim. They will even honor the warranty after you have your data recovered. As to your question about "who", I will use the drive. Anyone that doesn't want to use their replacement drive from Seagata, WD, Samsung, HGST just let me know. If it's unopened I'll pay the shipping for you to send it my way (this offer is only good for the 50 states LOL)

All that said, I feel your pain and completely understand how devastating data loss can be. That doesn't make me take the position that your data safety was Seagate's problem. Just like all the Western Digital recoveries we get, it's not WD's job to protect your data, they are selling an appliance and will gladly replace it if it fails within the specified warranty period.

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Blizzard Data Recovery

Of course, you are right
But as several people mentioned the warranty is for the device, not for data recovery services
However Seagate thought of that too and offers Data Recovery warranty, as well, too bad you didn't want to buy it, but that's on you.

PS: Actually you might want to check with Seagate, maybe your device has the DR warranty included

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

@johnnyBrandom, would you like to try an experiment?

I propose disabling the 3.3V supply for the NAND flash chip. I don't hold out much hope, but it would be interesting to see what happens to the terminal log.

These are the 3.3V LDO regulator chips which I have seen adjacent to the NAND flash:

https://www.onsemi.com/pub/Collateral/NCP708-D.PDF
https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/ldl112.pdf

Pin #1 (the dot) is the ENable pin. It appears to connect to Vcc via a pullup resistor. If so, then it should be safe to short pin #1 to ground.

The choice is yours. :-)

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks for the suggestion! I like it and will report back with the results if/when I try this. Do you happen to have a data sheet for the NAND? It will help to know a few things about it's specs and behavior in advance. I couldn't find it on Toshiba's site.

I think the first experiment I want to try (less destructive) is to rule out a bad bga connection on the nand by applying some pressure to top and bottom to see if it begins to work again. From there, perhaps I may try to apply thermal change to the chip (hot/cold) to see how it responds. I'll reply back with results when I have time to run these tests.

I have a hard time believing that the nand itself has failed after such a short time although I guess it's possible. I did a quick estimate to try to determine the failure rate of this particular SSHD design (revA) and think it's around 20% or more (based on reading the amazon 1 star reviews that reported quick failures - this is a fairly large sample size). So there appears to be a design issue with this HD. It's also interesting that there is no perceptible change on the top or bottom layer of the revA and revB pcb's - I suppose it might be to an internal layer but this makes me think it's also possible they had a problem with something silly like spec'ing the wrong pitch on the bga pads for the revA design. Probably a long shot but it's an easy test.

But thanks again for the suggestion! It's nice to get something other than replies suggesting it's impossible for someone outside of the DR business to succeed. I already know my chances are slim so that information is not particularly useful. Although I do appreciate that those posters are trying to help by offering the best advice they can give.

Sorry, I don't have any datasheet sources for this particular NAND.

Just FYI, I do maintain a datasheet database here:

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=100&t=1577

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

It's just my opinion, but ISTM that there is no excuse for a fault in the NAND cache to result in an inoperable drive, with consequential data loss. AISI, there should be a failsafe mechanism in the firmware to allow the drive to continue operating in cache-less, read-only mode, with full access to the data on the platters. Alternatively, the drive could initialise the NAND cache and continue working as normal. In both cases a warning could be communicated via a new, specially assigned SMART attribute. Such an approach would benefit both the user and the HDD manufacturer.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Such a thing would be good for users, I agree.

But this is Seagate you’re talking about, a company that pushes data recovery insurance on its own drives and also has its own data recovery company! Really?

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Leaving the NAND unpowered will not help as it loads firmware from nand during powerup. Nand plays a critical role on these.
pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Well, I suppose one way to reach a solution would be by brute force.

Take a donor drive, secure erase it, and then remove the NAND and dump its contents. Determine the structure of the firmware area.

Now dump the patient's NAND and manually "secure erase" it by initialising the non-firmware area. I'm assuming that nothing needs to be done to the ROM, although that would be easier to dump and analyse (eg with F3ROMexplorer freeware).

BTW, is there an equivalent non-hybrid model of this drive? If so, would it be possible to access the data by transplanting the ROM adaptives into such a non-hybrid donor?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Sounds like $600 worth of work to me

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery
Founder of The Data Recovery Professionals Group

ISTM that Seagate's data recovery business is a double-edged sword. If they didn't have one, it could be construed that they didn't care about their customers' data. But because they do have one, others may see it as an attempt to profit from their customers' woes.

In WD's case, they refer their customers to their data recovery "partners", most (all ?) of whom use tools produced by Russian and Chinese hackers. That introduces ethical questions of its own.

Personally I would reserve judgment until I could see how much profit Seagate are making. ISTM that the ethical approach to this dilemma would be to run the DR aspect of their business as a break even concern.

That said, I suspect that the in-house solution to the OP's problem would involve a few keystrokes and a simple terminal command, presumably to initialise the NAND as in earlier firmware. If so, then how does that justify a price of US$600 ?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I would hope that a DR shop would know of a more elegant approach. Brute force is a last resort.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Indeed we do, but I was referring to the work involved in your suggested fix

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery
Founder of The Data Recovery Professionals Group

Now I'm confused. Is your shop able to handle this case?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I was talking about a more delicate approach in general to SSHD drives fixes, but Doomer is correct, this particular drive is not recoverable. I think the OP know that. Sorry for the confusion, I was just having fun with you.

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery
Founder of The Data Recovery Professionals Group

This reminds me of an old joke

One day, Watt was invited to find a malfunction in a large steam engine.
Since the owners incurred great losses due to downtime, and other engineers could not do anything, they invited the inventor of the steam engine himself and promised to pay $1,000, a lot of money for those times.
Watt went around the engine three times, then asked for a sledgehammer.
They brought him a sledgehammer, he swang out and hit the casing of the engine.
“Now start it,” he said. The engine has started.
The owners felt fooled and robbed for paying $1,000 for just one blow with a sledgehammer, so they decided to cheat and asked Watt to write an invoice, so that later they could try to challenge it.
Watt took a piece of paper and wrote the following. "For a blow with a sledgehammer - 1 dollar, for knowing where to hit - 999 dollars"
The owners were forced to pay the full fee.

If you have free time, desire to do it and knowledge why not to do it?
You can later sell it for $1 and "show them all"

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

Once i built a solution for a problem it takes laughable amount of time to apply it and recover the data.
But it would be ridiculous to think of this move as the recovery itself, we have to take development into account, and the time spent on forums

pepe

ps: and the fact that when you think it is gonna take 5 minutes to solve a problem by routine, 3 new problems will show up and make you suck all day long.

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

I'm talking about Seagate, not some poor schmuck who needs to research a solution of his own. Seagate should know the answer, without needing to do any research. They should only need to consult their own internal docs.

Sorry if my statement was ambiguous.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.