Hello everyone, I hope you're doing well.

I'm currently working on a case involving a 1TB Samsung T7 external SSD. When I connect the drive—either to a USB port on a regular computer or to the USB interface on the PC-3000 Mobile—it only recognizes the USB bridge chip of the SSD.

All voltage levels appear normal. I used this blog post as a reference:
https://www.zeroalpha.com.au/services/d ... a-recovery

On the same page, I found the pinout for the USB bridge chip. I’ve been considering the possibility of accessing the PCIe bus directly to see if I can bypass the USB bridge and gain access to the internal NAND.

Has anyone handled a similar case? Or has anyone successfully accessed the PCIe bus by soldering directly from the controller to an adapter using a wired-up method?

Can you transplant the controller and NAND to a compatible NVMe model? That said, if your DR tool doesn't support the controller, then what?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

"aekhv" did this, contact him

Would it be worth trying to disconnect the SSD from the bridge IC and keeping it powered on for several hours (?) so that it can attempt to repair itself?

One way to do this would be to keep the Asmedia bridge in a reset state. I don't have a datasheet, but Pin A or Pin B are possible Reset pins. If you measure the voltages at Va and Vb, that may help to narrow it down. When you locate the Reset pin, you can just run a shorting link to ground.

Locating the Reset* pin on USB-SATA bridge ICs:

https://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=3381&p=24481#p24481

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to give you an update. After discussing the case with a colleague, we noticed that one of the NAND chips barely heated up when powering the device. That detail led us to suspect a weak connection.

I performed a reballing on the memory chip that wasn't heating properly—and it worked! I was able to gain access to the data.