Hello,

I have a drive with this controller that stays in RDY when powered on, but does not ID.
Any attempt of communication with the SSD makes it stay in BSY mode.
I see this controller is not supported on pc3k, should I replace the controller with another one? as far as I know, nothing is stored on RAM or CPU.
Moreover, this drive has Filevault 2 encryption.

Many thanks in advance

The controller itself is NOT the problem, so it does not need swapping.
Likely, it is the firmware translation component that is problematic, most commonly due to NAND Flash chip degradation.
Unless you could find a way to load a compatlble loader and manually build a translator, unfortunately there is not much else to do.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Do you have PC-3000 Portable ? I had a similar issue (always BSY) and I could image it with turn on/off hardware function, it was RDY for 0.5 sec everytime I powered it on, it took a coupld of hours but result was perfect.

Hi,

Yes I do have PC3000 Portable
The drive stays in RDY mode but does not ID (no passport)
If I try what you say it constanlty gives reading error no matter what
Any interaction with the SSD will give a BSY state

My question here is if I could just swap the controller from a donor drive (same capacity I assume?)

Thank you for your input

Why swap the controller?

_________________
Luke
SSD Data Recovery

Can you post a screen shot.

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The 4 horsemen of data loss : Gravity, Modular PSUs, Youtube and Your mate who works in IT.

Drive wont ID or initialize, stays in BSY mode

I have to turn off power and power on again and it will stay RDY

I read on the PC3000 forum about a case with the same controller in a MacBook SSD, which had physical issue.
Roman said:

"the SSD drives does not store anything critical in the RAM / CPU, so you could transfer only the NAND chips, it would be enough.

Here is a good article about it:

https://blog.acelab.eu.com/alternative- ... t-ssd.html"

I do not have a hardware issue.

Moreover I opened a ticket with Acelab and they replied this:

"Sorry for the bad news, but this drive is not supported. Starting from the Samsung 850 EVO, Samsung company completely lock the internal firmware modification and techno mode options. Right now, without a digital signature, we can't influence such drives without compatible Utility...
Our developers are working on it, but I'm afraid that the solution will not be released in the nearest time."

If understand correctly my issue is with the controller and the firmware itself. Swapping the controller with a good one should do the trick, right?
Worst case scenario I could swap all 8 memory chips to a good SSD donor, right?
This is the only thing I need to know

Thank you all for your input

+1 for MCU is working. Trouble is degraded slow NAND or bit errors in FW.
Swapping MCU or NAND will not help.

_________________
Digitalsupport Data Recovery
https://digitalsupport.dk

Thank you for your input
Isn't the FW embeded into the MCU?

OK maybe I was not clear at first. From the manual on Samsung SSDs initialization this is supposed to work like this (although this controller is not supported):

- The drive loads firmware from the masked ROM (in the MCU) to the RAM and proceeds its execution
- Memory chips test
- Drive loads main firmware portion from memory chips to RAM and transfers control to it
- The drive reads the structures from SA and generates the translator
- Drive reads its config pages

If all these are passed succesfully, the drive reports READINESS, returns its ID and allows access to the data. I get everything here except these last two. No passport.
If the second stage is "memory chips test" and there were at least one that does not test OK, it shouldn't prompt a RDY state. Am I wrong? drive becomes RDY instantly when powered on.

Even if there were bad bytes when building translator, would a drive prompt a RDY state?

Can you get ID if you try to access rom mode, need to short jumper. Not sure which one.

In the previous post you suggest that the firmware is stored in the controller, then you make this post. There may be some generic firmware code in the controller, but the bulk of it is definitely stored on the degraded NAND. If the board behaved like it had a short, the controller could be one of the many points of failure, thus why it is sometimes easier (a relative term with these coated Apple SSDs) to transplant the NAND to a known working board.

In your cases, I'm 99.9% sure that swapping the ROM would not fix this firmware issue any more than swapping a PCB would fix a firmware issue on a failing hard drive.

It seems to me, there was no point in your asking the question if you are already convinced that it will work. I suggest you go for it and report back with the final result.

_________________
Luke
SSD Data Recovery

On a side note...as your SDD does come RDY initially, there is a small chance that it may be recoverable with a DeepSpar PCIe Imager (DPI) which has a special repower routine that buys some more time with Apple SSDs.

_________________
Luke
SSD Data Recovery

Yeah I was confused, as I know that the firmware in the MCU at least has capability in safe mode for basic instructions such as ID and data accessibility. This is why I am thinking this could be an issue (due to the RDY state).

I don’t have a tool you mention from DeepSpar.

Will report back when I can with this.

Thank you for your time!

Will report back in a few hours with what you say. Thank you.

It is the bottom one
I cannot access ROM
There was a time the drive was with all LEDs on including the ERR one. Hardware or software reset didnt do anything, neither power off-on. But jumping those pads brought the drive back to RDY state.

Funny enough I tried mounting the drive in Data Extractor, setting manually max LBAs, and DMDE did see it and started scanning LBAs but got stuck.
PC3000 reset software/hardware all the time

Yesterday I had a case like that, highly unstable AHCI SSD. Apple SSD SM0128 GB, SSD is ready but get BSY instantanely when reading, I get ID. So I am cloning with PC3K -Portable, switch on/off, it will take 3-4 days but it's working.

Lucky you! haha

This is what I get if do what you do!
I have to set LBAs manually, disable hardware and software reset.
It just keeps jumping
No ID