Worthy bump!
Today I found a Vertex2 SSD in my long-abandoned junk bin. It was junk for the obvious reason as stated elsewhere - it locked up at some point long ago, who knows how... probably by going to sleep (I use sleep on my laptops multiple times a day, like you put your phone to sleep).
Now some untold years later, I figure there had to be a solution to it by now. Googled it, which led me here. And it led me SO VERY CLOSE to the solution... yet, not quite.
Let me do a little give-and-take exchange here. What I have to offer is my experience with my Vertex2, and what I ask is for any shred of hope that another firmware/manufacturing file may be in existence - because that's what's stopped my efforts cold.
So, what I can tell so far is that our tools available here are very much the result of a leak, probably by a company called AsiaCom (which, quick Google, is a company that offers services like this). No company ever really makes its own products - they develop them, specifying what parts are used, what the controller will do, maybe how things are laid out on the board... and they ask consulting companies for that, then they take the result, send it to a contract manufacturer, then take the resulting product and stuff store shelves with it. AsiaCom was just one contract manufacturer, perhaps of several, that actually built and manufacture-programmed the drives for OCZ. Heck, maybe even AsiaCom did some (or much) of the board design itself, with OCZ's input.
That means this one file is just one leak, of one subset of boards that would be used in a drive with the OCZ Vertex2 label on it. That's actually pretty huge - not many products get a leak like that for repairability reasons. Those files are pretty well legal protected, and AsiaCom could pretty easily lose their contract with OCZ if OCZ were still around... but since they're kinda not so much, it's a bit more open to interpretation. My interpretation is that this is awesome and could save a lot of SSDs from the E-waste shredder...
Mine, not so fortunate. Mine seems to be YET ANOTHER revision of the Vertex2 drive design - unlike the two other variants I've seen so far.
My drive is a 90GB model, labeled "
OCZ TECH PCB-0075 X01", and it uses MT (Micron) 29F32G08CBABAWP chips - 24 of them, not 16. There is no configuration choice for that - the one that most closely matches is a 50GB model, but uses 16 chips instead (on scale, that seems correct). However, it also uses a SF-1222 chip, not a SF-1200.
Most importantly, this board
does NOT have the P8 and P9 pads in positions that would make sense to do the "manufacturing mode" switch. Instead, it has an unpopulated "J3" thru-hole pattern near the UART port and LEDs. On a hunch, I just shorted the pads when powering it up. It detected as "SandForce" and 28GB-or-so, as expected for manufacturing mode. MPTool happily detected it. I also found that you can totally get it in and out of manufacturing mode by hot-plugging the power connector; MPTool detects it (with the jumper for mfg mode if you want it, of course).
However, any attempt by MPTool to "process drive" in manufacturing mode, or to do self test, data log, etc... just runs into a bus error - ATA command failed, "Error in IOCTL SEND ATA Call. Error code = 80c00002". Google led me to a forum thread on that, lots of info, all in Russian. I might spend the night reading over the Russian forum thread through Chrome's translate... (normally a Firefox user
)
MPTool reports my drive as currently being "106A11R0", which highly suggests being the firmware version. Being as though I'm trying to flash something to the tune of 346A13F0, that looks like an entirely different version lineage, and explains why I can't find the right config, nor get the tool to talk to it. It's an entirely different animal.
TL;DR:
- there are variants to the Vertex2, one size doesn't fit all, but might fit most.
- this firmware bundle is a leak, possibly old, thus why it doesn't include all variants.
- the leak might be from only one of several contract manufacturers (CMs) that OCZ used
- there are more firmware files to be found - possibly more versions of MPTool as well.
- my board has a jumper, J2, instead of P8 and P9 pads, to enter manufacturing mode.
- my drive is still dead