In the Marvell series, the only way I know is to avoid bad luck
In the Caviar series I used ROM head map as very reliable head diagnostic tool for knocking hdds.
In Marvel series, I try to limit ROM WRITE operations to a minimum, only in cases where there's no external ROM, because of the high percentage of "death" pcbs we had.
Unfortunatelly the Marvell USB families seems to suffer more from this problem than the sata ones did.
Meanwhile, all death pcbs have to go to the "ressurection" process with a dedicated programmer device
So I really wonder if this is:
a) a hardware problem where the ROM wasn't engineered to receive more writes
b) a softare problem where UDMA still has do fix some issues to have a safeproof Marvell family WD ROM write operation.
-BR-