Question Samsung EVO 850 1TB SSD undetected by BIOS

[bilquest]

I acquired 4 of these drives from a server that was recently de-comissioned, but I have yet to be able to re-use any of them. I have tried external USB enclosures (2 different USB-SATA chipsets), internally installing a drive into 2 different dell desktop machines (with freshly flashed BIOS.) Nothing recognizes these drives, not even Samsungs Magician tool that I installed on my Mac. While these 4 drives were functional when the server was taken offline, I find it strange that all of them would suddenly go bad. The server they were installed to was configured with a software RAID formatted to ZFS. I've googled to the end of the Interwebs but have found no answers. Is there any way to reset these drives back to factory? If so, how would I do it considering I can't find any machine to recognize these as drives at the BIOS level? I also tried a split USB cable thinking it was a power issue, but no luck. With the usb enclosure, I get a /dev/sdx device when plugged in, but running hdparm I get the following (which I think is just from the USB-SATA controller and not the drive.)

SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 24 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

ATA device, with non-removable media
Standards:
Likely used: 1
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 0 0
heads 0 0
sectors/track 0 0
--
Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 0 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 0 MBytes
cache/buffer size = unknown
Capabilities:
IORDY not likely
Cannot perform double-word IO
R/W multiple sector transfer: not supported
DMA: not supported
PIO: pio0

 

[fzabkar]

How does smartctl see the drives? Could they be password protected? Are you able to see the SMART attributes?

 

[bilquest]

I think it's just outputting the USB controller, but here's smartctl output:

smartctl 6.6 2016-05-31 r4324 [x86_64-linux-4.15.0-213-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

/dev/sdb: Unknown USB bridge [0x0bda:0x9201 (0xf200)]
Please specify device type with the -d option.

 

[fzabkar]

It would better if you could access the SSDs via SATA.

There is a way to power up the SSDs in "safe mode". This will tell us if the controller has basic sanity. We would do this only if the SSD is completely unresponsive.

In your case there is a row of 7 pads at the long edge of the PCB. Shorting the two isolated pads during power-on should invoke safe mode or ERRORMOD. The SSD will identify itself accordingly. You can release the short a few seconds after power-on.

https://tpucdn.com/ssd-specs/images/d/31-pcb-front.jpg
https://tpucdn.com/ssd-specs/images/d/31-pcb-back.jpg

Edit:

It appears that your bridge is a Realtek Semiconductor RTL9201.

Try the following options for smartctl:

-d sat​

-d sat,12​

-d sat,16​