Samsung EVO 850 - workstation won't boot

[silcontool]

Hello,

All of a sudden this SSD won't work. Something happened last night and HP Z workstation got rebooted. It won't boot of the drive anymore. I get error "Non-system disk". Not sure if some electronics inside is dead or not. I opened the case. The board doesn't show any sign of damage that I can see.

Can someone please advise on the troubleshooting steps I should take?

Hopefully data is intact and can be retrieved.

Thanks

[silcontool]

It's 500GB SSD mode # MZ-75E500

Here are the pics of the board.

Attachments

[fzabkar]

Measure the voltages at the indicated test points. Use any screw hole as your ground.

Attachments

[silcontool]

Thanks for help response. I'm waiting to receive SMD probes. My DIMM probes are too big for the task.

I had bought this drive in 2015 and its warranty expired in 2020. Would SSD stop working if it crosses defined TBW ?

Going to connect it a Linux box and try to get more information about what's probably wrong with the drive which apparently seem dead.

Also thinking about taking it to a Data recovery company.

[fzabkar]

Usually these drives fail when the firmware "panics", which in turn is usually due to bad NAND. You can determine whether the flash controller has basic sanity by shorting the "safe mode" test points at power-on. The drive should then identify itself with its default factory ID, albeit without data access.

https://blog.acelab.eu.com/pc-3000-ssd-samsung-family.html

[silcontool]

Question for you in regard to the "safe access" try.

Will it spoil NAND or data in anyway? I guess it is done at the controller level? If it is, they it may not be harmful I think.
I don't have PC3K so it is like a blind game. Would it revive the panic'd firmware in some way and get back to normal operation possibly in the next reset?
In the video, a modified firmware was used which probably provided access to the data.

If the unit has a bad NAND, would it mean a some loss of data if not all ?
Would remaining date be possible to retrieve in a specialized way via DR services company?

I wonder what a DR company would do in this case and charges?

Thanks

[fzabkar]

A DR company would follow the procedure in that video. Safe mode allows the tool (PC3000) to upload a custom loader which then builds a virtual translator (to replace the damaged Flash Translation Layer). The data is then retrieved, albeit with possible bad sectors. I am not aware of any DIY solutions in such a case. I have never heard of safe mode damaging the data, otherwise why would PC3000 do it?

[silcontool]

Just to confirm the "safe mode" test points are the next 2 holes left of the 5 holes right?

There are 2 smaller holes at the very left of these 7 holes.

Thanks

[Lardman]

A DR company would follow the procedure in that video. Safe mode allows the tool (PC3000) to upload a custom loader which then builds a virtual translator (to replace the damaged Flash Translation Layer).

There's only support for the 850 PRO Controller SNLN045X01-8030 not the 850 EVO . We're currently blind on these too without custom solutions unless one of the larger labs knows something I don't.

Very occasionally you may get access by flicking it in and out of safe mode - but it's rare, most of these are degraded nand after 7 years use it's to be expected.

[silcontool]

Connecting the drive to a Linux box didn't reveal anything in the "dmesg" so I think it was not detected at all.
I tried the "safe mode" but it didn't help either.

The chips don't feel like warmed after been powered up for a while. Somehow I feel like a component failure, suspect fuse.
I will check the voltages once I've the probes.

[fzabkar]

Connecting the drive to a Linux box didn't reveal anything in the "dmesg" so I think it was not detected at all.
I tried the "safe mode" but it didn't help either.

I'm not a data recovery professional, so I've never actually seen how a Samsung SSD behaves in safe mode. Perhaps it sends a message to its UART port?

FYI, this is how other flash controllers identify themselves in "ROM mode" (aka safe mode):

http://vlo.name:3000/hw/ssd/rommode/

You can get some insight into safe mode, etc, in the following document:

http://www2.futureware.at/~philipp/ssd/TheMissingManual.pdf

[Test_Drive]

Hi silcontool,

Same ssd (850 evo 500gb) and the same thing happened to me today.
I was not at home for 3 days. My computer was off. I came back today, tried to started the pc and it went on bios.
After few attempt I saw that my ssd was not detected anymore... I bought it in 2015.
I checked Samsung Magician and SSD Life like a month ago and all was good.

I tried another sata port, no change. Then I tried my usb/sata adapter, nothing showed up in windows or Disk Manager.

[silcontool]

Oh man. Sorry to hear about that.

In my case, my computer was on ( usually stays on ) and no apparent SSD issue observed prior to failure.

Going to contact a DR company to check if they can help in recovering the data.

Seems PC3000-SSD does support the controller so maybe there is a hope but then I don't know what DR company is capable of. If they could, don't know what the cost would be.

[pepe]

@Test_Drive

S4LN062 is not listed in pc3k support list. I made some research last year and got somewhere, but i was working on working ones, so the problem with yours needs to be identified. I have some thoughts about yours and would check it if you don't mind sending it.
Since this is an active research, no ready solution yet, so it might take a longer period of time to get the data off the unit.

pepe

[silcontool]

I will wait until I hear back from DR company.

@pepe - Would you like to share your effort / research you have had with this SSD operation?
I tried the "safe mode" but since I didn't have the UART port up, I don't know know what happened in there but it didn't help.

[DRUG]

We can deal with S4LN062 controllers.

However the quality of recovery is always around 60/75% due to NAND wear.

[silcontool]

@DRUG

It is good to know that the controller is supported by DR companies like yours.

Wondering how much does your company usually charge for the DR service?

Thanks

[DRUG]

@DRUG

It is good to know that the controller is supported by DR companies like yours.

Wondering how much does your company usually charge for the DR service?

Thanks

We charge 1250€+VAT.
We need about two weeks for full reading.
Payment is only required if data is recovered.
No data no fee.

[silcontool]

Ouch!!

I don't need to recover the data, so going to play with the board before I destroy it

[Lardman]

going to play with the board before I destroy it

Please don't just destroy the drive when you're done with it. As Pepe says, as an industry we lack research and development drives and faulty material we can actually work on rather than client cases. Without doing this recovery prices will always remain high. If it's just going in the bin consider donating it to a lab for research instead.