SSHD drive, solid state memory only works from cache

The operation helped to shed light on this type of storage solutions, the characteristics and features can sometimes be misinterpreted or incorrectly understood, and their effects in terms of security. One could think, for example, that a hybrid disc is composed of two parts, a conventional "hard drive area" and a modern "solid state area". The analysis of a SSHD damaged electronic level, as a result of a short circuit, however, has revealed that the disc concerned is characterized by a very simple structure: a single NAND memory chips on the PCB, then populated by traditional components which is You can find on the hard disk drive, all connected to the magneto-mechanical made of rotating and moving heads.

The data recovery operation may appear, a priori, particularly complex: the presence of solid-state memory may in fact be a difficult obstacle to overcome, given the extreme diversity of flash memories and their proprietary algorithms used by each producer that would make data recovery, as often happens in these situations, a company to manage the time with little chance to build on previous cases.

The first surgery performed has seen the replacement of the damaged PCB and recalibration of the original firmware, which contains essential information for proper operation of the unit. The second step is instead an electronic intervention in order to have the full LBA surface.

The intervention of electronics complete replacement, including flash chips, it still allowed access to the entire volume of logical sectors. This means that in the NAND no data is present and that, therefore, the solid-state portion is only used as a FIFO cache to improve the performance of the unit and not as a means for the storage of data. The case was resolved without the need to intervene in the NAND chip present on the damaged PCB.

The operation conducted has thus shown that the hybrid drive is only the flash technology used for caching for increased performance and not for the purpose of permanent preservation of data. The SSHD solution is built with conventional components that are used for a mechanical hard drive, with the addition of a NAND flash chips. The data are then stored and stored on magnetic platters, and hence the level of risk is similar to that of traditional hard drives, with the same critical conditions: a physical shock suffered by SSHD unit would have the same consequences that might occur on a hard disk magnetic / conventional manual, and the solid state memory portion would not bring any mitigation before a problem of this type.

As regards the possibility of data recovery, it is possible to occur a corruption of the NAND flash memory which could in turn cause a complete inoperability of the drive due to irreparable errors in ECC level on NAND pages, even with a magnetic part and integrates without flaws.