An external SSD has two components that can stop it working — the USB bridge and the drive’s own controller — and they produce identical symptoms. Establishing which had failed was the entire diagnosis.
A documentary producer carried a pocket SSD between edit suites holding rushes and working sequences. It stopped being recognised on any machine — no drive letter, nothing in Disk Management, no response on three different computers and two cables.
Externals fail at two levels and the symptoms are indistinguishable from the outside. The USB bridge can fail while the drive inside is perfect — the commonest external fault and the easiest outcome. Or the drive’s own controller can fail while the bridge works fine, which is a substantially harder job.
Opening the enclosure and connecting the internal drive directly settled it. The bridge was fine; the drive did not enumerate on a direct connection either. The fault was the SSD controller, and the bridge had simply been passing on its silence.
The drive was reached through vendor-specific diagnostic mode and its translation tables read from the service area. It responded intermittently, dropping off the bus under sustained reads, so imaging ran in short bursts with the drive rested between them, re-reading anything that had come back inconsistently.
A band of flash proved genuinely unreadable rather than merely unstable — degraded blocks rather than a controller problem — and those regions were logged as gaps rather than guessed at.
Video files were played end to end rather than counted, since a clip with a gap will often open and stop partway. Affected clips were named individually, which matters on an edit — a producer needs to know which shots are incomplete, not how many.
About 96% recovered, including every working sequence and the overwhelming majority of rushes. The shortfall traced to degraded flash rather than anything done afterwards. The producer now keeps a second copy of each shoot — a pocket SSD that travels between sites is among the harder-working devices anyone owns.
An external that is not detected could be the bridge or the drive — and only one of those is trivial. Send the unit complete rather than opening it, since on several models the bridge is part of how the drive is addressed. Repeated replugging of an unstable drive gives its controller more chances to write something unhelpful. SSD recovery from £300 +VAT.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
Want a bit more detail first? Fill in the form with more about your issue and an engineer will review it and send you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 01865 593000.
It could be either the USB bridge or the drive’s own controller, and they look identical from outside. If the bridge has failed the drive inside is usually perfect — that is the easier case. A failed drive controller is harder but still frequently recoverable.
No. On several models the bridge is part of how the drive is addressed, so a bare drive may read as unformatted even when healthy — and initialising it at that point causes real damage. Send the unit complete.
Not from movement — there are no moving parts. But a drive used heavily across multiple sites accumulates write cycles quickly, and flash does degrade. A portable working drive should have a second copy somewhere.
From £300 plus VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic and a written quote. Controller-level work carries a 50% deposit with the balance payable only on success.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.