Generally, solid-state drives fail rapidly and very quietly: usable on Monday; completely silent on Tuesday. Most commonly, the NAND will have all data intact. However, the layers that read this data are no longer responding to requests. This scenario is recoverable. We resolve two critical elements that decide whether it is worth attempting prior to your committing to a course of action.
A firmware update writes to the service area that recovery would need to access, and if a firmware update stalls on an unstable drive it can render it permanently inaccessible. Secure erase is inherently non-reversible. If the drive is experiencing dropouts, do not continue to use it.
SSD failures provide minimal forewarning, and appear to be similar regardless of root cause.
Either of these two issues can cause a recovery process to cease as soon as it begins, so both should be identified early on during diagnostics and not later in the recovery process.
Encryption. Many solid state drives now encrypt data automatically (Class 0, TCG Opal, Samsung’s T-series portable and others including Windows using BitLocker). If you do not provide the encryption password/key then otherwise perfect working NAND will produce unusable data, and no lab changes will help.
TRIM. If what you wanted was removed from an active drive, it’s very likely that TRIM will have erased the blocks in question within minutes as they are now available for reuse. In this case, there will be absolutely no way to recover the deleted data. A failed (dead) drive on the other hand does not run TRIM because it is no longer operational. Thus, failure preserves what continued operation (health) would have destroyed. Tutorial: Samsung 860 EVO controller and firmware corruption.
There are two possible routes for this type of recovery. The diagnostics will identify which one you have before you commit to either one.
The recovery process depends on your specific solid-state drive (SSD), so the make/model/capacity will define the process as soon as we know what model and size you have.
If the controller is able to be put into a diagnostic state, the service area and all the translation tables are read directly from the drive.
Once the drive has been cloned, it is then re-read in unstable areas until each sector reads consistently. We do not simply accept an initial read.
When the controller can’t be brought up, we simply take out the flash memory and read it directly. Then we unscramble/de-interleave/ECC correct the data to the controller’s original order.
NTFS, APFS, ext or exFAT are reconstructed using an image file and validated prior to delivery by actually viewing and/or opening each file as opposed to simply verifying that it exists.
The price we charge for recovering your lost data is the same regardless of whether you have a SATA, M.2 or NVMe device.
Our prices for SSD and NVMe recovery start at £300 +VAT (a free 48-hour diagnostic will be performed first along with a written quote). In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. We require a 50% deposit when performing any type of controller level physical work, with the balance due only upon completion of the successful recovery of your lost data.
The bare (or uninstalled) hard disk or solid state drive should be sent in instead of the device itself, along with its manufacturer, model number and storage capacity. We also need to know if the SSD is installed and soldered to a motherboard from a laptop as opposed to being easily removable; we’ll immediately let you know whether or not this is something we can take on. For full articles go here: an Asus ZenBook NVMe gone overnight; a Lenovo SSD knocked offline by a power cut; Samsung NVMe Recovery: A School’s Overheating SSD.
Ship your drive to us with a brief description of the fault so we may do a complimentary evaluation. The engineer will evaluate your drive and confirm the exact quote in writing before he begins working on your drive.
Please get an estimate from us via either a phone call, or our online quote request form prior to shipping/dropping-off your device. In order for us to retrieve your data, we need to receive your device first. Please pack the drive carefully, include your contact information, and after running a complimentary diagnostic we will send you a written confirmation of the exact cost, before proceeding with any work on your item.
Posting it? We would suggest using a tracked and insured delivery method. Want to drop it off? That’s okay too. Monday to Friday, from 9am to 5:30pm is good; no appointment necessary: simply prepare the item as described above.
Do you want a quoted price prior to having one of our engineers evaluate it? Fill out the description of the drive and issue/problem on this page and one of our engineers will review your request and respond with a customised/quoted price.
We’ll be in touch shortly. If it’s urgent, call 01865 593000.
Our most frequently asked technical questions concerning dead SSD devices.
Generally. More often than not, the most significant failure points with serious SSD (solid state drive) failures are the controller or firmware rather than the flash memory itself; hence, the NAND continues to hold your data behind a layer which ceased to respond. This layer can be accessed in vendor mode, where a copy can be made as a read-only image.
Typically a fault within the controller/firmware. The indicators for this are when a drive disappears from the BIOS screen or displays no model string at all; alternatively, it may display an absurd capacity. In none of these cases does this represent the failure of the flash memory but simply indicates the failure of the layer responsible for reading it.
Generally not off a working drive. The TRIM process deletes the sectors behind files that have been deleted within minutes and the delete operation is real. Therefore, when an SSD fails to operate, there is a better chance that a dead drive would be a good option because it may fail to perform TRIM as well.
It can. Some SSDs are set up to encrypt data by default. In addition, some users (for example, those using Windows) also use BitLocker to encrypt their data. This means that even if the user has access to the physical drive, the data can still be encrypted, and therefore unreadable, and there would be no way to decrypt the data without having the correct password or recovery key. We determine whether the device is encrypted prior to beginning our work.
Not where the memory is integrated into the PCB and the board itself has failed; particularly on T2 and Apple Silicon-based Macs, the encryption key associated with the board will fail with it and all data associated with that encryption key will be unrecoverable. Please provide us with information about what model your computer is so that we can immediately tell you.
Data recovery starts at £300 +VAT after completion of the initial 48-hour free diagnostics service and once we have provided you with a written quotation for the cost of your project. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. For controller level projects, we require a 50% deposit to proceed with the job, but the balance will only be paid upon successful completion of the project.
Get a free diagnostic; a fixed price of £300 +VAT per drive. We will recover all makes of SSD & NVMe drives in-house on a controller (FW) and at NAND level. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data.