Hi everyone!
Have anyone seen this chip?
Is there any kind of interface for that?

It is strange the chip part number is the same as Intel SSD Part Numbers. maybe a fully integrated drive on a chip, a monolith SSD essentially?

"A fully integrated drive on a chip" sounds to be right.
What on Earth is happening in a flash world?!?!

Making our life difficult...

PM sent...

_________________
Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

Here is a SATA/PATA "SSD on a chip" (Silicon Motion FerriSSD):

http://static6.arrow.com/aropdfconversion/e34a936206aef41642e4466404978f1b53963ba5/ferrissdproductbrief_eng.pdf
http://www.storagesearch.com/ferrissd.pdf

Toshiba and Samsung both have NVMe SSD-on-a-chip products.

I suspect that the vacant BGA location above the Intel chip is reserved for a second SSD. This should make it easier to determine the pinning for the supply rails and interface signals.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-bga-nvme-ssd-600p,36172.html



pinout (Arguably useful) : in this doc: https://pcisig.com/sites/default/files/specification_documents/BGA_SSD_ECN.pdf



Even this may be old hat even before they admit it exists. want something 1,000 faster than current SSD? [urlhttps://www.geek.com/chips/new-intel-storage-is-1000-times-faster-than-your-ssd-1629656/[/url]

Yeah, I had one of these show up already. Fortunately I was able to boot the machine to Linux from a USB and image the SSD out to an external HDD.

_________________
Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

I wonder if the future of solid state storage is socket SSDs.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

No, I think the future is more and more shifting toward single board and monolith design. The less opportunities people have to repair a product, the more often they'll need to buy a new one. The days of upgradable computers is dying out my friend. Someday we'll all go the way of the TV repair man. But, who knows, maybe by then we'll all be repairing space-x shuttles or something else complex that's prone to breaking all the time.

_________________
Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

I don't think people sit around and actually decide to make something less repairable, like as a business decision. a socket costs, and sockets are used only when necessary. BGA does away with a small cost. I do think however that the same is true that they also are not factoring in repair at all. They are simply trying to increase storage/speed and decrease cost.

an upgradable BGA socket for one of these chip SSDs is a great idea though. Many motherboards are coming out with M2 slots, so I think Franc is pretty close in his prediction, but I wonder how fast that too would go out of fashion.

Amazing how little information is out there on these chip SSDs - you would think it would be a product to be proud of and advertise. I guess device manufacturers have a more direct line to storage vendors, and this kind product is fine kept under NDAs and such.

All I know is Flash recovery is going to continue to be a complete pain in the ass.

And another one came today.
Now it is Surface Laptop.
Desperately need some socket solution.

You can make one. !!
https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/m.aliexpress.com/item/32823128771.html

Unfortunately mine will not boot into recovery or via a USB (Windows or Linux).

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

Make sure you're using the right UEFI and Secure Boot settings in the BIOS. It took me some figuring out to get a linux USB to boot and not all builds would work, some just crashed.

_________________
Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

It wouldn't be too bad to just wire it up like a monolith I suppose. I doubt it'd require power input on all the different voltages either. My guess is it's just different options the manufacturer can opt to use to power it. I'd guess that just using the 3.3 or 1.8 would suffice.

_________________
Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Should work if the controller is still functional I guess. If I can't see anything significant on the board and decide to take the chip off I will let you know. In between the two posts I did work out the secure boot issue and got it to boot into Linux and I can see the SSD which is positive.

By the way, how did you image the drive after booting from Linux when it only has one USB port?

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

Usb hub?

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

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

Wasn't sure if booting from a USB on a hub and trying to save over the same hub would work. I guess it does. Many thanks

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

Yep, I just used a self-powered hub and plugged in both the USB to boot it and a dongle for wireless keyboard/mouse. Then after booting I plugged in an external hard drive.

Worked like a charm and got a full ddrescue image in my case.

I found that the WiFi was very unreliable in linux for me. Not that you need the WiFi, I was just trying to install something on my live USB that wasn't already there, but it'd drop offline and never work again until I'd reboot. I'm curious if you have the same issue.

_________________
Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

I am using Ubuntu 16.04 from a live USB but am having difficulty installing ddrescue on the USB. I can use R-Studio to image but the NAND is pretty unstable and keeps dropping out at about 8% done. I ham oping to image backwards and see if that makes a difference. I have tried installing ddrescue on the live USB in another system and get the same issue so it not the Surface WiFi causing the problem. Is there something special that needs to be installed in order to get ddrescue to work on a live USB?

I have also tried DEFT Zero as it has ddrescue built in but it will not boot on this Surface.

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