Hello there,

I got 2 of my Crucial MX500 1TB drives undetected by BIOS/Windows/Linux.

No obvious component failures, all caps good, no burn marks.

Voltages at L50{1-3} are good:

L500 - 3.2V - NAND Vcc
L501 - 1.79V - NAND Vccq
L502 - 1.1V - Vcore
L503 - 1.5V - Vsdram

SM2259H is getting warm/hottish.

No other heat source detectable.

No shorts found so far.

One thing I noted: in the beginning, both SSDs were still being detected occasionally by a fast disconnect/reconnect of the USB plug but it got worse quickly. After some time I could not get them detected any more even with the fast disconnect/reconnect method.

What (who) can it be now?

Any ideas? Suggestions welcome!

TIA

Chris

If all the angry pixies are where they are supposed to be then it doesn't leave a lot more to check - there's no support in pc3000 ssd for them. If you know what you're doing and it sounds like you do, carefully give the nand a reflow. You can also leave just sata power (no data) connected for a couple of hours to see if that clears things.

_________________
Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

The one board measured has a marking "2037" on top layer below the (blue) silkscreen. Is this the PCB revision? There's a couple of markings available that would make for a revision. "GTW 18" is another one.

There's a 2 pin header J3 and a 2x6 pin header J2. J3 is a breakout of J2-7 and J2-11 (GND).

Does anybody know what J2 and J3 are for, resp.? I wouldn't want to blindly short J3 to see what happens, yet.

Is there a fw-reset function available? Or some Safe-Mode or something along those lines. Anything that would make this SSD get detected again.

Temperature of the controller ends up at around 56°C, uncooled, as per my no-name chinese IR-cam.

Thanks for replying. Yes, I already had PWR-only connected for a couple of hours. To no avail, sadly.

Reflowing was my last resort. Interestingly, you're suggesting reflowing the NAND. Any particular reasoning for this? I'd have started with the controller itself. Then again, for no particular reason.

C

About the degrading detectability thing: though I couldn't find any wildly-off resistances on the boards, it strikes me as a resistance going bad gradually, up to the point of being too far off and making the board go stealth mode (undetectable). Certainly, measuring in-circuit isn't the best way to check an R. A couple of "clean" Rs showed values such as 10k, 33k. Others rather uncommon values such as 200k etc. are more likely due to in-circuit measurements, I guess.

Desoldering and resoldering those pesky-footprinted components is nothing I enjoy in particular. It's just too damn small, even for my taste. Sadly.

The controller is essentially just a dumb process box, there's nothing really to degrade. It's far more likely that it's being fed garbage either firmware or data from the nand and you've just passed the threshold for being able to cope with it.

These and samsungs evos are my amongst my most "returned unrecoverable" drives.

_________________
Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

OK. Thank you for your feedback.

Happy Holidays!