Yesterday, a discarded Samsung SD863 datacenter SSD found its way to my hands. Although a bit older – this one’s from 2016 – these are supposed to be quite reliable (except for a few rumoured firmware bugs), and 480GB of capacity are not to be disregarded even at today’s remarkable flash prices. Since it did not suffer from the usual drillholes of unreadability, I hooked it up to a linux machine – hopefully immune to virus-infected, supposedly “lost” thumbdrives – to give it a try. Unsurprisingly though, the drive announced 1GB of capacity, which does not fit its type MZ7KM480HAHP and explains its disposal. I had a hunch that the reason might lie with the microcode:

ata6.00: ATA-9: SAMSUNG MZ7KM480HAHP-00005, ERRORMOD, max UDMA/133
...
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdd] 1965352 512-byte logical blocks: (1.01 GB/960 MiB)

ERRORMOD as a version index looks rather like something went horribly wrong, causing some kind of corruption to the firmware. At least it still communicates through SATA, which indicates some backup capabilities.

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