Comment by justinclift

2 years ago

It mentions the required tool being available from um... interesting places.

Doing a Duck Duck Go search on the "SMI SM2259XT2 MPTool FIMN48 V0304A FWV0303B0" string in the article shows this place has the tool for download:

https://www.usbdev.ru/files/smi/sm2259xt2mptool/

The screenshot in the article looks to be captured from that site even. ;)

Naturally, be careful with anything downloaded from there.

15 comments

justinclift

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gaius_baltar  2 years ago

There were several instances were I saw an interesting tool for manipulating SSDs and SD cards only available from strange Russian websites. This one at least has an English UI ... A lot of research seems concentrated there and I wonder why it did not catch the same level of interest in the west.

  • numpad0  2 years ago

    These are genuine factory tools supplied by chip vendors such as Silicon Motion, supposedly under NDA, leaked and passed around loosely among Chinese factories. These things are sometimes repacked with malware installers, so blindly running on your dev machine with AWS keys might not be the best idea. Trying to run it on Linux, macOS, or rewriting in Rust might not be great too.

    It doesn't happen in the West because manufacturing happens in China in Chinese language. I suppose it's easier for Russian guys to (figuratively) walk into their smoke room and ask for the USB key.

  • userbinator  2 years ago

    and I wonder why it did not catch the same level of interest in the west.

    Because people in the west are too scared of IP laws.

  • justinclift  2 years ago

    Yeah. That site has a lot of info for a huge number of flash controllers/chipsets/etc.

    Wish I had a bunch of spare time to burn on stuff like this. :)

    • fuzzfactor  2 years ago

      Good to see they are still available.

      The wide variety of controller/memory combinations makes it quite a moving target.

      This is the "mass production" software that makes it possible to provision, partition, format, and even place pre-arranged data or OS's in position before shipping freshly prepared drives to a bulk OEM customer. On one or more "identical" drives at the same time.

      For USB flash thumb drives the same approach is used. Factory software like this which is capable of modifying the firmware of the device is unfortunately about the only good way to determine the page size and erase block size of a particular USB drive. If the logical sectors storing your information are not aligned with the physical memory blocks (which somewhat correspond to the "obsolete" CHS geometry), the USB key will be slower than necessary, especially on writes. Due to write-amplification, and also it will wear out much sooner.

      Care does not go into thumb drives like you would expect from SSDs, seems like very often a single SKU will have untold variations in controller/memory chips. Also it seems likely that during the production discontinuities when the supply of one of these ICs on the BOM becomes depleted, it is substituted with a dissimilar enough chip that a revision of the partitioning, formatting, and data layout would be advised, but does not take place because nobody does it. And it still works anyway so nobody notices or cares. Or worse, it's recognized as an engineering downgrade but downplayed as if in denial. Wide variation in performance within a single SKU is a canary for this, which can sometimes be rectified.

drtgh  2 years ago

I was unable to find the source code, so it is important to be careful. In my case it sounds like a faith jump that I don't have (my apologies to the developers).

In any case, this is a feature that manufacturers should provide. I wonder how it could be obtained.

userbinator  2 years ago

In countries where people have been less conditioned to be mindless sheep, you can more easily find lots of truth that doesn't toe the official line.

Spreading xenophobic FUD only serves to make that point clearer: you can't argue with the facts, so you can only sow distrust.