I have decided to hop onto this forum after I decided that I want to play around with resurrecting broken SSD (definitely not because current climate forced me to). I got myself a Samsung PM851 in unusable condition, bought from the previous owner that don’t need it anymore since they already have all the newer version of their data already in other drive before it just suddenly died during windows reinstall. So I decided why not play around to resurrect the thing so I can use it as spare drive, I suspect that the usual victim is the controller itself. So to make it clear, I don’t want to try and recover data from broken SSDs, I just merely want to resurrect broken SSD which means whatever is inside can be just gone no issues. I’m also not going to sell it, if it dies again, it dies.
My endeavor to resurrect this SSD brought me to various amount of resources to repair this drive, one of which is the post about Samsung SSD controller apparently having unique encryption key (not SED) that prevents recovered data to be readable, and this post from this forum also points out that HP OEM SSDs unfortunately have signature check that prevents cross flashing firmware. I want to ask about what I’ve found out so far, just in case if there’s anyone here that ever deal with Samsung PM851 recovery/ resurrection (or Samsung SSD in general) can help me out on this one since I’m new to SSD repair
- Is it really true that one cannot just replace the controller of this SSD without the drive being unusable due to encryption that are per unit controller key? Is it more like, if there’s data inside it would be unreadable and you can’t use the drive because new data stored in there will also be unreadable, OR is it going to be usable for new data it’s just you cannot pull out previous data because it would be unreadable? And is this universal for every samsung SSD? (Again, I’m not seeking to pull data from this drive)
- Why the need for JTAG on this drive? If the goal is for resurrection only, is it required? I’m planning to just reball the controller before replacing it just in case it’s only solder issue
- Again, from what I read in that post I linked above HP put a signature check on their SSD in order to avoid cross flashing. Is this true for this PM851 as well? I want to flash Lenovo PM851 FW onto it because this drive is basically 840 EVO in OEM clothing and back then, this and 840 EVO has issues with performance degradation. But knowing this one HP issue, is it even possible?
Edit by Fernando: Thread moved into the “Solid State Drives” Category and title shortened