There is a special service area in Hitachi drive: SA-C. It’s a third firmware copy for the drive. The most firmware modules which stored on SA-C are same as SA-A/B. But different with SA-A and SA-B, this service area record the original firmware and never take part in the normally working for the drive, that means even SA-A and SA-B were broken, the firmware modules on SA-C are still in good status.
By switching to SA-C, we will be switching the working mode from normal to factory mode; we can only handle with the SA when we are in the factory mode, not the data area:
This is very useful for Hitachi drive repair; For example, the target hard drive is making a clicking sound. If you can be sure that the mechanism such as the HEAD stack has no problem, then it must be caused by firmware corruption. By switching to the factory mode, the clicking will be stopped, and you can update the firmware modules of SA-A and SA-B (the two SA for normal working mode) then get rid of the clicking.
Or you find the SA-A and SA-B becomes read-only (means that you can save modules from them but you cannot update any module successfully), we can have it fixed by switching to factory mode also:
And the most important function: remove Hitachi HDD password protection, you need to work under factory mode also.
There is another function which reference to SA: “Select the Working Mode”:
Different with SA-A/SA-C Switch, in this way, we will not change the working mode of the drive, but means we want to work on that SA only (the drive will still work on normal mode), such as read/write operations towards the defined SA. The numbers shown in the column are the starting positions of each SA (these starting positions are also unique information which stored in the NVRAM of the drive).
Modules in SA-A:
Modules in SA-C:
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