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Sandisk Ultra II 960GB SSD

May 3rd, 2016, 9:54

Hello everybody....

I have here a Sandisk SSD Ultra II 960GB and I need to recover data.

On PC3K UDMA The SSD goes ready and I can read ID (model, serial capacity and FW). After this, when I try to do anything, the SSD hangs, stops responding, goes to busy state and become unusable.

Is there any solution for this? What tool is needed? Or is there anyone that can do the work for me?

Thanks
Simone

Re: Sandisk Ultra II 960GB SSD

May 3rd, 2016, 11:12

Hi, What is the controller chip number for this one, Marvell 88SS9189?

Pretty sure this is TLC NAND, and even though most people think this is a bad idea, the vendors think that "if we use NAND that fundamentally has more errors, then we just have to code in more error correction and she'll be right mate.."

It may be easy to recover using chip off procedure, as it does not support encryption, but I have yet to see anyone reveal the controller has been reversed.

This controller has some unique features that use about 40GB like SLC, then moves it to regular storage, it also appears to have some other features that may add to the complexity. I think SSD's are getting more difficult to recover. Plus more fun

I would offer but I am up to my ears already :(

Maybe try Arvika Data recovery

Re: Sandisk Ultra II 960GB SSD

May 3rd, 2016, 12:08

Controller is Marvell 88SS1074, if this may help.....

Re: Sandisk Ultra II 960GB SSD

May 4th, 2016, 4:42

Cant say that Marvell controller based drives are easy to recover by chip-off. All drives i've seen has a complex scrambling xor pattern. Also many modern drives on Marvell uses hardware encryption (not sure about Ultra II, but i wont surprise). So it could be recoevered if you've successfully reversed xor pattern generation algorithm and drive dont use encryption. So i dont advice you unsolder the chips if you dont have a guaranteed solution for you drive. It could be waste of your time.

I've not heard about common solution for you drive, that everybody know. Just may be some DR labs have their own know-hows.
So it probably would be better to leave this drive on a shelve till the day the solution will come.

Re: Sandisk Ultra II 960GB SSD

May 12th, 2016, 8:02

Looks like the SSD has memory and microprogram issues.
To go ahead it needs to be switched into SafeMode, but there's no way to do that at this moment.

As for the chip-off, I believe it would take few months of work to find the proper XOR using just the dumps with user data, as algorithm is very complex.
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