Question Potentially broken SSD

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anvoice

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Jan 12, 2018
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I recently dug out an old OCZ Vertex 4 Sata III 128GB SSD. It appears to be bad, since bios, windows 10 disk manager, and Linux cannot see the drive (tested many SATA ports, cables, different power cables, and a different computer). There could potentially be useful data on it, but not sure. Not important enough to send to a professional for recovery, but I'm doing my due diligence to see if it's possible to troubleshoot the hardware.

Opened the drive up, connected to PC with SATA and power and powered system on. There is an indicator LED close to the power port, and it turns on green. The only sources of heat I can see with a thermal camera are the processor (which gets to around 32-33C), and a chip U13 labeled 283 NC G24, which gets to about 30C.

I cannot find a schematic for the drive, and my electrical engineering skills are as of yet limited. I do have a multimeter, but don't know where to take readings. Found a 2-3 year-old thread on a hard drive forum where someone with this drive asked for help, but his LED was off when powered so possibly a different problem.

Anything I can do? If it's a bad cap for example I could order a similar one and attempt to solder on with a hot air station. I can include photos/measurements if necessary. Thanks for reading.
 
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That was OCZ's third drive using the Indilinx Everest 2 controller after they bought the company (previously they had only used LSI Sandforce). Considering their first and second drives using this controller (Petrol and Octane) were perhaps the least reliable SSDs ever made, it's probably a lost cause.

OCZ went out of business the very next year after the Vertex 4 was introduced, and their storage assets were sold off to Toshiba Corp. who would later spin off their own entire storage division as Kioxia
 
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If there is any life, you will see diagnostic output from the SSD's UART port. Connect a USB-TTL converter to the Tx and Rx pins of J5 and then use a tool such as PuTTY to communicate with the SSD.

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/6074/dsc_7758.jpeg (controller side of PCB)
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/6074/dsc_7759.jpeg (underside of PCB)

That "283" IC is a dual converter.

SC283, Semtech, Ultra-Small Dual POL (point-of-load) Regulators, 1.8A, 0.8V to 3.3V output, 2.9V to 5.5V input, VID pins, 2500kHz, MLPQ-W18 package:
https://www.semtech.com/products/power-management/femtobuck-dc-dc-regulators-controllers/sc283
https://semtech.my.salesforce.com/s...e/h1K72zN8cCKK7OvlLIoTky324Bv9qCtGZDnlKfU3lbo

RT9991GQV, Richtek, 3-channel Power Management IC for SSD, 1.5MHz 1A & 2MHz 3A, 3 synchronous buck converters & one voltage detector:
http://www1.futureelectronics.com/doc/RICHTEK/RT9991GQV.pdf

Measure the voltages at the inductors near those ICs, namely L2, L3, L4, L5, L6. Use any screw hole as your ground reference.
 
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fzabkar said:
If there is any life, you will see diagnostic output from the SSD's UART port. Connect a USB-TTL converter to the Tx and Rx pins of J5 and then use a tool such as PuTTY to communicate with the SSD.

Measure the voltages at the inductors near those ICs, namely L2, L3, L4, L5, L6. Use any screw hole as your ground reference.
Click to expand...
It took a while, but I got all the readings:
SSD diagnostic output immediately after powered:
"firmware initialization - begin"
Nothing beyond that. Waited several minutes to make sure.

Voltage readings:
L2: 2.685V
L3: 1.220V
L4: 1.510V
L5: 1.815V
L6: 3.359V

The PC the SSD is connected to (original system that used to boot with it) throws the following message: "The current BIOS setting do not fully support the boot device." I can get to BIOS from there, and the message additionally instructs me to change CSM parameters until the system can boot. I've already tried changing those, but the main problem is that the BIOS does not actually see an attached disk. No diagnostic output from the SSD while in BIOS either.

Edit: small detail: not every screw hole, at least on my drive, can be used as ground reference. The one nearest the green LED does not seem to connect to ground.
 
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All the voltages seem to be OK. The message at the UART port must be coming from the controller, so it would seem to be OK, also.

I expect that the firmware has "panicked" due to bad NAND or a corrupt Flash Translation Layer. I am not aware of any DIY solution.
 
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fzabkar said:
All the voltages seem to be OK. The message at the UART port must be coming from the controller, so it would seem to be OK, also.

I expect that the firmware has "panicked" due to bad NAND or a corrupt Flash Translation Layer. I am not aware of any DIY solution.
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I see, that is unfortunate. Any chance of any of the modules having developed a bad contact? Due to cracking from moisture (drive was sealed, but who knows) for example? I can hit it with some heat from a rework station and see if something changes, since I can't hurt anything at this point.
 
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anvoice said:
I see, that is unfortunate. Any chance of any of the modules having developed a bad contact? Due to cracking from moisture (drive was sealed, but who knows) for example? I can hit it with some heat from a rework station and see if something changes, since I can't hurt anything at this point.
Click to expand...

I really don't know. The way that professional tools approach this problem is to place the SSD in "safe mode", upload a "loader" into the SSD's RAM, build a virtual translator (to replace the firmware's own broken translator), and download the flash contents. I don't believe there is any problem at the hardware level. A translator is a table which associates an LBA with its physical block address.
 
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fzabkar said:
I really don't know. The way that professional tools approach this problem is to place the SSD in "safe mode", upload a "loader" into the SSD's RAM, build a virtual translator (to replace the firmware's own broken translator), and download the flash contents. I don't believe there is any problem at the hardware level. A translator is a table which associates an LBA with its physical block address.
Click to expand...
Looks like it's time to give up then. Thanks for your help.
 
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