An SSD mind tickler for the forum…
You may have seen my other SSD post, about adding enterprise gear to a game console to get high quality video for movie streaming.
I have another enterprise SSD related mystery someone here may know how to resolve, if it can be resolved at all.
The story of Intel DC S3xxx backup drives:
I purchased several Intel DC series drives back in 2014, to serve as backups. One, a 3500 I added to my PS3 for reasons discussed in other posts.
A second, a 3700 drive, I purchased as a one off. It’s the only DC drive > 120GB that was purchased for extreme emergencies. A big investment, at the time, but for my purposes one of these is enough in case of a severe RAID or software defined storage failure.
I unboxed this 3700 drive back in 2015, installed it in an old laptop I had laying around (an ASUS N61vn), Installed Windows 8.1 on it, moved a few files off and on to it to be sure all the rates matched up, and left the drive in the laptop for years until a few days ago.
Later, I removed the drive from the machine, connected it via USB using a portable enclosure, in order to prepare to format it for use as a backup. To my consternation, the drive is seen by the OS but for some reason cannot be written to. The error codes are not codes, the response from the Apple machine’s Disk Utility used to make the initial attempt to communicate with it is not interpret-able. So, I start getting on calls with Intel. We diagnose it using Intel SSD utility and the command line returns 'locked with ATA security". Intel does everything it can to wash it’s hands of the situation, alleging the ASUS motherboard manufacturer locked the drive by default, using this old school standard.
Later, I speak with ASUS, and they say their boards do not lock drives. However, if drives become locked by locking BIOS then you can unlock the drive through the BIOS utility. The drive does not respond to the BIOS in the original ASUS laptop, as though the board in the machine has been changed and, if responsible for locking the drive, is out of step with the original lock.
The drive is new. Two other machines say that the drive is locked (how it became locked is unclear since I made no effort to lock it), one machine says the drive is “bad”. There are so many capabilities in these DC drives (which you can see by running Intels optimization utility on other non locked drives). I am almost 100% sure the drive is perfectly fine, but the laptop has locked it somehow and there was no documentation that came with the laptop that said this would occur with any drive used in the machine. With the ASUS laptop and the drive out of lock step, there is no obvious path forward. Neither ASUS or Intel will take responsibility for the mechanisms surreptitiously applied to the drive or provide a supported method of reversing them, assuming it is not a bad drive. I find it impossible that it could be bad, because the 3700 level drive is rated for 10 complete re-writes per day for 5 years and has essentially not been used for more than 30 minutes.
Has anyone come across this issue before? I’m pretty upset that these features (permanently locking out drives) are present in the hardware and there is no documentation or notification on them that states the drives exposed to them will be unable to reformat or be used again. This seems unbelievable to me, and I’d like to know if anyone else has experienced this.