New supported Sandisk SM2246XT drive

[H3rmes]

As soon as the update hit I had one of these on my desk. With no manuals or info I had to experiment a lot so I'm hoping this info might be useful to someone.

Sandisk SSD Plus 240GB. Drives become ready with full ID and size, full logical access all is good. I mirror the whole drive no errors but data is a repetitive pattern of about 50 MB looks like encrypted data. I thought it was a customer encryption but I confirmed that is not the case.

Tried the drive with the new utility. All chips look fine but some have bad sectors. Safe mode, upload loader, goes to default 14GB size, create translator in DE, all of a sudden I can see data and a file structure. Can read only physical. All logical without a loader is garbage. I'm happy to recover all data using physical only problem is not matter how I create the translator I can only access the first 14GB of the drive. Even manually setting the size to 240GB will not give me the full access. I assume I need a better loader maybe on with logical access. If anyone has one of these Sandisk, a good one, I would appreciate a copy of the firmware to try that on.

[Roman_TS]

Hello! Sorry for delay, we will post new article about SM-based SSD recovery in next few days.

If you need any help with your current drive - please, create new ticket on ts.acelab.eu.com, and our engineers will help you.

[H3rmes]

Hi Roman, Good to have you back,

I did create a ticket and I got this reply: "Hello Mihai,

Sandisk SSD drives based on SM2246XT controller chip are not supported by PC-3000."

When I pointed out that it is supported I never heard back from Filipp

I was hoping I might get a bit more help from you

[Roman_TS]

Filipp is working on your ticket By the way - here is description about SM-based SSD:
http://blog.acelab.eu.com/pc-3000-s ... ility.html

[H3rmes]

Fantastic, thank you for the update Roman! Do we have a pdf manual for these SM based controllers yet?

[Roman_TS]

Manual will be ready a little bit later - developers are writing them, sometimes it took too much time

[LM-DRO]

Was this issue ever resolved? I am experiencing the same problem with a SanDisk SD82BAT-256G-112. Followed the steps in the tutorial linked above yet I only see the drive recognize about 14GB. The Drive is encrypted so I need to make a full image of the drive to decrypt. Controller is SM2246XT.

[Roman_TS]

For SM2246XT you should use Sandisk Utility for SM based drives. After drive initialization, you should create translator in utility and create new task in DE based on Utility (With ignoring ECC errors). Follow this steps and you will get access to image for further copying.

[LM-DRO]

Wow! Thank you very much Roman. We've been struggling with these drives for a while and can finally make progress. Is there any hope on recovering sectors that were "Read with ECC Errors" or should I accept those as lost and work with what I got?

[Roman_TS]

Yes, exactly. Or create a map of bad sectors, and reread them again with several attempts. Finally, you get better result

[diskeom]

Hello,
Could you ensure me that the SSD Sabdisk based on SM2246XT is supported by "SSD Ver.2.3.1" utility ?
Thank you very much

[Roman_TS]

Yes, it is supported by PC-3000 SSD 2.3.1