DC S3500 failed after 4 weeks - what to do?

[JT7]

Hi everybody,

I bought a DC S3500 120 GB in June. It worked fine initially, but after about 2 weeks it started giving me I/O errors. After 4 weeks it failed completely.

It still reports its size correctly to the SATA controller and it is possible to retrieve some SMART information from the drive, but any attempt to read or write data fails. The behaviour of the drive is equivalent to the Intel 335 Series tested in Tech Report's endurance experiment, i.e. the firmware triggered a kind of self-destruct, making the data on the drive inaccessible. The only difference being that the Intel 335 failed after writing 750 GBytes, whereas my DC S3500 was never even filled with a full 120 GB:

http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte

My number one concern is if there is any way to salvage the data on the drive. I do have a backup but it was made in June. Intel's support hotline didn't know of any way to do this. I'm wondering, is there some ATA command which can be sent to the drive to force the firmware to make the data accessible again? I don't care if some of the files are corrupted, I could detect those by comparing them to my backup.

There's a picture of the DC 3500 board over at Tom's Hardware and apparently there's a connector on the bottom left next to the Flash controller. Is this some kind of JTAG connector? Would it be possible to force the firmware via that connector to make the data on the drive accessible again? I do realize this would require opening the case and thus void the warranty but I'd risk that if I'd get my data back:

(Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-dc-s3500-review-6gbps,3529-2.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-dc-s3500-review-6gbps,3529-2.html)

Thanks,

JT

[Kevin_M_Intel]

Hello s3500-victim,

Let me help you with this.

The information you have provided is very interesting and we thank you for sharing it here. Since the data has been affected I recommend you contacting an Intel® Partner to get all information from the drive. Here you have the link:

https://software.intel.com/partner/search-detail?companyguid=80ade2e2-0a7d-e111-a1da-001a4b33b648 https://software.intel.com/partner/search-detail?companyguid=80ade2e2-0a7d-e111-a1da-001a4b33b648

It is important to say that it is not that easy to get the information from a failed SSD so this can be done by Intel® partners.

Kevin m