Question Any way to resurrect a bricked fake SSD?

[ET]

I'm guessing that the answer is "not without special equipment", but I figure I'd ask anyway.

I bought a "2TB" SSD off AliExpress, ran h2testw on it, and it died after writing about 1TB to it. This and the way writing slowed down suggests to me that it was a 1TB QLC drive (which is also reasonably consistent with the price I paid).

I got a refund for the purchase, but it seems to me like a waste of silicon to throw away a 1TB drive just because it had some random data written over important system areas. Is there a way to get it back by writing actual good data to that area?

And for the future, is there a robust but less destructive way to detect a fake drive?

Thanks!

 

[fzabkar]

There are repair tools for some controllers. There are also tools which can detect the NAND flash type,

http://vlo.name:3000/ssdtool/

 

[ET]

There are repair tools for some controllers. There are also tools which can detect the NAND flash type,

http://vlo.name:3000/ssdtool/

Thanks. Any information about using them? I guess I could just try to run a few, but any help would be appreciated.

 

[fzabkar]

I haven't needed to use them myself. The README files are in Russian, so you may need to translate them. Be aware that "repair" is data destructive.

 

[Storm-Chaser]

pictures of the drive? thx

 

[ET]

Here.

 

[fzabkar]

Can you show us internal photos?

I found several reviews, with photos, but there is no consistency in controllers or NAND.

Yeestor YS9082HC controller, hynix NAND:
https://theoverclockingpage.com/2022/02/13/review-ssd-somnambulist-sata-240-gb/

Silicon Motion SM2259XT controller, Spectek NAND:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__NjTHLKWHE

Yeestor YS9082HC controller, Sandisk NAND:
https://mysku.club/blog/china-stores/91390.html

The Youtube video appears to show an MPTool being used to recover a dead SSD.

One of the other sites has a screenshot of the sg_flash_id tool detecting the NAND ID.