PC-3000 SSD. Maxio MAS0902A/DM918 recovery process

Posted on 02/09/2026 by ACELab team

Current article was written using PC-3000 7.8.17 software update

Hello everyone!

In this article, we’re going to dive deep into the process of recovering data from a SATA SSD equipped with a Maxio MAS0902 controller series, including rebranded versions such as the Lexar DM918.

Currently, PC‑3000 SSD supports the following Maxio SATA controllers:

  • MAS0902 – full support,
  • DM918 – full support,
  • MAS1102 – under development.

Maxio, formerly known as JMicron, manufactures SSD controllers. The “MAS” controller series follows a different drive initialization process compared to popular drives based on Phison and Silicon Motion controllers.

To correctly prepare such a SATA SSD for data access, please follow this guide.

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PC-3000 SSD. Apple SM0XXXG AHCI drive Samsung recovery process

Posted on 12/15/2025 by ACELab team

Based on ACE Lab’s extensive experience in SSD research, the most common problem with non-functional SSDs is damage to the firmware, specifically critical parts like the translator or service area system blocks.

The surest solution for damaged SSDs is to connect them directly to the PC-3000 Portable III / PRO and perform recovery via a special utility designed for the specific controller. This utility can operate with the drive’s internal firmware to repair it in case of corruption.

While it is not feasible to develop a custom utility for every SSD controller on the market, ACE Lab is continually working to expand our coverage and support for as many controllers as possible.

As a result, we sometimes tried some alternative methods that allow us to achieve a disk Ready State that is not officially supported by PC-3000.

Below is a typical example of restoring a damaged Apple AHCI PCIe drive, which is based on a Samsung processor and does not have a typical solution in the PC-3000 SSD Extended Add-on, but still has a good chance of accessing all data!

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PC-3000 SSD Systems. The List of Supported SSDs (regularly updated, ver. 3.7.4)

Posted on 08/06/2025 by ACELab team

Hello friends!

The ACE Lab constantly researches drives, which results in a rapid expansion of the Support List for most of the modern SSDs. So with the PC-3000 Systems that support Solid State Drives, you will always be on the cutting edge of
data recovery technology!

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PC-3000 SSD. Initio INIC-6081 recovery

Posted on 05/20/2025 by ACELab team

Hello, dear PC-3000 Users!

Sometimes Data Recovery Labs may receive a very strange SSD that may be based on an unknown controller. Our Technical Support dpt received one of such weird drives. Let’s figure out how to deal with it!

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Posted in Articles, Data Extractor, PC-3000 SSD | 1 Comment

Intel Optane Memory H10 (H20) Series Data Recovery

Posted on 03/04/2025 by ACELab team

In this article, we will look at the specifics of recovering data from Intel Optane Memory H10 (H20) series. These are NVMe M.2 SSDs often found in laptops and monoblocs with Intel processors.

These drives use two types of memory: Optane memory (originally 3D XPoint) and QLC 3D NAND. Each type of memory operates on an independent channel thanks to PCIe line remapping technology, which must be supported by the PC chipset. So there are two independent drives in the same physical device. 

However, they are rarely used independently, but are usually combined into a single logical drive using special software (Intel Rapid Storage and Intel Smart Response technologies). The Optane memory drive is used for data caching and the NAND memory drive is used for primary storage.

These features also affect the approach to recovering data from such drives. In this article, we will look at how to copy data correctly with PC-3000 Portable III and Portable PRO and how to get a correct image of a logical volume.

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RAID technology overview: Proper and Improper Rebuild for RAID-5

Posted on 01/16/2025 by ACELab team


Improper rebuild is a mistake customers often make when trying to solve array problems on their own. This issue is complex enough to confuse a data recovery engineer. It is important to understand exactly what is happening to the data and how it affects the chances of a successful data recovery.

We will look at the most popular level — RAID-5. We will consider how the processes of initialization, correct and incorrect rebuild are performed for it. Furthermore, we will discuss whether it is possible to recover data after an incorrect rebuild.

There can be many variants of incorrect rebuild for RAID-5, in this article we will limit ourselves to just one of them — when the new and old configurations are the same. This is the common case in practice and the easiest to explain and recover data from. Once we have studied it, we can move on to more complex cases in the following articles.

We assume that you have studied the previous article on RAID-1 and understand what we mean by initialization, rebuild, and the nature of the “improper rebuild” problem. So let’s go straight to the specifics of these processes for RAID-5.

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PC-3000 Flash – Noname (CBM2099) USB Recovery. Importance of Translator assembling

Posted on 12/04/2024 by ACELab team

Hello guys!

Sometimes, Data Recovery Lab may get a USB Flash drive with a no name controller inside in the COB (chip-on-board) package. Usually such controllers are extremely cheap, and you can find them inside “10 bucks” drives from Amazon / Alibaba or inside souvenir USB Flash sticks.

Anyway, people don’t care about the internal component quality: a Flash stick is a Flash stick that needs to be used! And if we have it, why don’t we put the most important and regularly used data on it?! Without a backup of course!

Here is the story of a tiny drive brought in by a friend of our TS engineer.

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PC-3000 Data Extractor. An easy way to make a task on a network drive

Posted on 11/19/2024 by ACELab team


Hello Friends! Modern drives become bigger and bigger every day, and we must use large drives in our PC for current tasks to save customers data on them. A lot of us have more than one computer with PC-3000 in our Labs. Purchasing a large number of hard drives for multiple computers becomes quite expensive, and local free space goes away too fast. What if we had the ability to save tasks from all computers to network drives and work with them in Data Extractor like as they are on local drives? Let’s discuss it in this article.

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RAID technology overview: Proper and Improper Rebuild for RAID-1 (Mirror)

Posted on 10/28/2024 by ACELab team


Most RAID levels use redundancy to ensure the reliability of the array. Redundancy allows the array to continue operating without data loss if one of the drives fails. This technology was designed to save data, but if used improperly, it can lead to data loss.

In this article, we will look at the problem of an “improper rebuild”, which can make RAID data recovery very difficult or even impossible. This is a common mistake made by RAID storage users who try to restore the functionality of the array on their own. Only after failing to recover, they turn to a data recovery service. We will take a closer look at why people make this mistake.

As an example, we will use one of the easiest levels to understand — RAID-1 (Mirror). In such arrays, a complete copy of data is stored on all members (most often there are two). If one drive fails, all the data is on the other one.

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Work with AFH in Seagate F3 Utility

Posted on 09/09/2024 by ACELab team

Implementation of the tool in the utility was delayed for a long time because work with the heating parameters of the read-write head required extreme caution. An incorrect choice of tactics for work with a damaged drive will lead to a scratch – irreversible damage to the surface of the disks containing user data. Before moving on to work with the AFH wizard, we will briefly describe the technology. Its essence explains, why inappropriate work with it poses fatal risk to the HDD.

AFH (Adaptive Fly Height) is the system adjusting the flight altitude of the magnetic head slider section containing the writing and reading elements. For clarification, we shall refer to the following illustration from patent sources describing the technology.

 

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Posted in Data Extractor, PC-3000 HDD | 4 Comments