A brief outage during a save, and afterwards the machine would not boot. The SSD was physically perfect — what had broken were the internal tables it uses to know where anything is.
An engineering practice lost power for under a minute during the working day. Most machines came back; one desktop did not, reporting no bootable device. Its SSD held CAD drawings and a local project database that had not yet synced to the server.
The drive was detected but reported an incorrect capacity and refused all read requests. That specific combination — present but incoherent — points at the flash translation layer rather than the flash itself.
An SSD does not write to fixed locations. It maintains a constantly updated map linking logical addresses to physical flash pages, moving data around for wear levelling as it goes. Those tables are held partly in volatile memory and committed periodically. Lose power at the wrong instant and the committed copy is inconsistent with what was actually written, so the controller refuses to present the drive rather than serve data it cannot vouch for.
Access was established through the controller’s diagnostic mode, and the translation structures read directly from the service area. Where the most recent commit was inconsistent, the drive was rebuilt from the last coherent checkpoint — which loses only whatever was in flight during the outage, typically seconds of writes.
From that reconstructed mapping the drive was imaged read-only, and the file system rebuilt from the image.
CAD files were opened in their application to confirm completeness, and the project database checked for structural consistency rather than merely copied — a database captured mid-write can be byte-complete and still refuse to open.
A complete recovery of everything except a few seconds of writes at the moment of the outage. The practice added a UPS to the machines holding local working data, which is the correct response — this failure mode is entirely preventable and has nothing to do with drive quality.
SSDs maintain mapping tables that must be committed consistently. An outage at the wrong instant leaves them inconsistent, and the drive refuses to present itself rather than serve data it cannot verify. The flash is untouched — but repeated power-cycling while troubleshooting gives an unstable controller more chances to commit something worse. SSD recovery from £300 +VAT.
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It can leave it unable to present itself. SSDs maintain mapping tables linking logical addresses to physical flash, and losing power mid-commit leaves those inconsistent — so the controller refuses to serve data rather than risk serving it wrongly. The flash itself is usually intact.
Because the translation layer is inconsistent, so the controller cannot describe a coherent address space. It is a firmware-level fault rather than physical damage, and the underlying data is generally unaffected.
Usually only whatever was being written at the moment of the outage — typically seconds of data. The drive is rebuilt from the last coherent checkpoint, which restores everything committed before that point.
From £300 plus VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic, with most jobs no fix, no fee. Controller-level work carries a 50% deposit with the balance on success.
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