Destruction pictures of my Verbatim 43888 (Pioneer UD04)

[Yethidran]

oh yes i bought both these drives Late November 2024.

[MK1234Tfan]

And no, there is no firmware chip on this board. The firmware chip is inside the drive itself.

There very well may be a firmware chip inside the drive itself. And I'm not trying to be rude or anything, but this right here is definitely a sop8 spi flash chip. There's some type of firmware on that little PCB. These slimline models may not have enough space inside the drive itself to include the chip and would explain why it would be on a separate PCB outside of the drive, but still in the enclosure.

I've flashed and dumped a lot of them in the past. The part number will confirm this in the datasheet.

I'm going to see if I can buy one of these for parts somewhere to see if I can dump what's on that chip.

[Yethidran]

IMG_20250120_120243.jpg (51.79 KiB) Viewed 276 times

IMG_20250120_120212.jpg (39.4 KiB) Viewed 276 times

[Yethidran]

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IMG_20250120_120429.jpg (286.78 KiB) Viewed 275 times

[Yethidran]

i tried my very best to get the pictures as clear as possible.
but i believe what Coopervid said is the truth.
The chip located within each and every drive is located within the drive itself,
And not on the thin green strip of that usb board. (i believe that green board is just for the usb signal transfer)

[MK1234Tfan]

Unfortunately it's not clear enough to see the part number. It looks like GD (GigaDevice) which does make SPI NOR Flash memory chips. Oh well..

[Billycar11]

There very well may be a firmware chip inside the drive itself. And I'm not trying to be rude or anything, but this right here is definitely a sop8 spi flash chip. There's some type of firmware on that little PCB. These slimline models may not have enough space inside the drive itself to include the chip and would explain why it would be on a separate PCB outside of the drive, but still in the enclosure.

I've flashed and dumped a lot of them in the past. The part number will confirm this in the datasheet.

I'm going to see if I can buy one of these for parts somewhere to see if I can dump what's on that chip.

that may be a flash chip but its not the drives firmware as the UD04 works direct sata/slim sata so thats not the drive FW

[MK1234Tfan]

There very well may be a firmware chip inside the drive itself. And I'm not trying to be rude or anything, but this right here is definitely a sop8 spi flash chip. There's some type of firmware on that little PCB. These slimline models may not have enough space inside the drive itself to include the chip and would explain why it would be on a separate PCB outside of the drive, but still in the enclosure.

I've flashed and dumped a lot of them in the past. The part number will confirm this in the datasheet.

I'm going to see if I can buy one of these for parts somewhere to see if I can dump what's on that chip.

that may be a flash chip but its not the drives firmware as the UD04 works direct sata/slim sata so thats not the drive FW

Right, I agree and that's what I was saying previously. There very well may be a firmware chip inside the drive itself, but I was curious to see what firmware might have been on that PCB chip.

[Coopervid]

Most likely for the USB->SATA controller. I once had to update the firmware of such a JMicron controller because it always lost connection.

[Yethidran]

yup, that should definitely be correct