In the Basic HDD diagnostics procedure post we looked at the common steps of diagnistics for any HDD.
Now we will look at the specific steps of diagnostics of WD Marvell drives.
In this article we will discuss the most typical situations and scenarios of WD Marvell drives diagnostics. We will not dive deep into the solutions since it can make this article endless. We just point out the way to understand the specific issue.
Also I must note that very often the drive can have not just one problem but a combination of them. For example very typical scenario – so called “Slow Responding problem”:
A writing element of one head degrades ⇒ the firmware detects that sectors were read with errors and adds them to the candidates defect list (R-List) ⇒ The R-List becomes overfilled with fake defects ⇒ the firmware start freezing during drives initialization ⇒ the drive can’t start normally (stays always busy) and we can’t access to the User data.
So we need to understand the internal processes of the drive to find out the source of the problem.
When we diagnose WD drive we should know how to easily determine its architecture.
The easiest way is to look at the PCB.
We can unmistakably determine the architecture by the MCP on the PCB.
Marvell MCP on WD Marvell architecture drives and
WDC MCP on WD Caviar architecture drives.
