4300 media players - unreliable flash?

[JOHN PAUL MORRISON]

Seeing a lot of failed 4310 DMPs - won't boot. When you disconnet the flash they boot OK.

Are there any recovery tricks besides pulling the SSD? attach a keyboard or serial console?

Is this a firmware issue with the Sandisk SSD? Workarounds/fixes, new firmware we can revive the SSD with? Sandisk customer support is useless here.

Last ditch is to replace the SSD

[wizard-its]

A few SDSA5AK-032G , ver 10.50.00 failed.

None of the SDSA3AD-032G / ver SSD_6.00 have died though.

Was going to try the Transcend 32GB SSD25H, with the same profile and screw holes but have been trying to find it cheaper than $75 and have not really gotten around to it. Just don't use laptop-grade hardware. If you're in contact with Sandisk and can get the power specs/consumption of the OEM drive please do let me know, and maybe that will help me decide whether to go forward with the 25H.

Can you mount the SSD and read its contents on a Linux box?

[JOHN PAUL MORRISON]

Found specs for the SDSA4AH-032G online. SanDisk support was useless - it's an OEM product and their response was "contact the laptop manufacturer". Interesting comment about laptop-grade hardware, because SandDisk support said it was a laptop component.

http://www.reactivedata.com/Products/ProductManuals/SSD_P4_-_SATA_-_Product_Manual_Rev1_1%20November%202010.pdf

I pulled several of the flash drives - some are readable in Linux (ext3) but are unfixable in fsck - they can't even be reformatted correctly, and I tried badblock detection. The underlying flash has been trashed, probably a combination of the ext3 wearing out the superblock and the flash firmware not spreading the writes out enough. 

Some drives are completely unreadable - Maybe this is a different failure mode.