S3610 1.8 inch SATA drives drop out

[dananski]

Hi,

I'm having some trouble getting these drives to be recognised reliably and was wondering if anyone has advice.

I have 18 of these 800GB S3610 drives after decommissioning the Dell R630 server they were in, and thought I'd put one or two in my workstation and use others for external drives, etc. But despite trying multiple drives with three different 16 pin to 23 pin SATA adapters and two USB adapters in two different computers, they all seem to be exhibiting similar problems: the drive is sometimes recognised ok at first then drops out within a minute. Sometimes they come on and off every minute or so but I haven't been able to use them for anything as they tend to die before any data makes it onto them.

Device manager sometimes shows an erroring device ("Device was not migrated due to partial or ambiguous match"), an Unknown device, not at all, or on one occasion a load of gibberish. Intel's Memory and Storage tool has only once displayed one of the drives since removing them from the server and it showed as a blank name with no details. The drives also don't seem to be behaving correctly outside of Windows, causing delays to POST and not appearing so far in UEFI.

The drives were working fine for years and I fail to believe that they all spontaneously stopped working at the same time.

I think I must be missing some crucial detail. Is there something about these drives that means they simply won't work in a normal Windows 10 Enterprise PC? Perhaps there is a SATA adapter which someone knows works with these drives? Or is this something to do with Dell branding the drives - do they make it so you can't use them with a non-Dell machine? Or is this not particular to these drives and more likely something that is happening for another reason? I secure-erased them using intelmas from the terminal on the server before removing them - could that have introduced an issue, or is there maybe a problem moving the drives from Linux to Windows?

Any help is greatly appreciated,

Dan

[dananski]

Ok, well this may be my final update unless anyone has further suggestions. I have found one more hint of what could be wrong in Lenovo's documentation for this drive:

https://lenovopress.com/lp0552-intel-s3610-enterprise-mainstream-sata-ssds

They have surprisingly sparse compatibility with the drive. I get the impression that while these enterprise drives are perhaps electrically mSATA 16-pin (7 data + 9 power), which can be adapted to standard SATA 22-pin, the controllers are not so easily compatible as typical SATA drives, possibly due to customisation from Dell or simply inherent to the original Intel design. I may ask Dell if they have similar compatibility charts.

This is a bit of a disappointing conclusion, so if anyone has further suggestions let me know, but otherwise I'll simply attempt to sell them on as I know this sort of hardware can be difficult to replace and it'd be a shame for the drives to be wasted.

Dan