A 60GB 1.8 inch Toshiba HDD with a Marvell processor chip
Marvell processor on your HDD.
“Marvell” is not a name that most computer users would recognise. In fact, most people will have never heard of the company. In the world of electronics they are huge and make some very important components for hard disk drives. If you have a Toshiba, Western Digital or Samsung HDD there is a very good chance that there will be a Marvell processor chip on the printed circuit board (PCB). This is probably the most important component on the PCB. In some cases, it contains the ‘adaptive’/ROM which has unique data essential for the recovery of your data stored on the disk (more of this in another post). Pictured is a Toshiba 1.8″ series HDD with a Marvell chip which has integrated the Toshiba’s firmware (CP). Toshiba HDDs are designed quite differently to all other manufacturers’ HDDs as nearly all of the firmware modules are based on the PCB and not the platter surface as per other HDDs. This can make Toshiba’s drives either very easy to work with for certain failures, or extremely difficult. We will cover some of the differences across the manufacturers’ HDD architecture in a later post and how these affect data recovery.
BBC News – Marvell faces huge patent fine over hard disk chips.