It is the characteristic SATA SSD failure and it confuses people, because every health indicator said the drive was fine. Wear reporting and the thing that actually failed are two different subsystems.
An 860 EVO spreads your data across V-NAND dies and keeps a translation layer recording where every block physically sits. Lose that layer and the drive still holds everything, with no way to present it.
The reason this failure arrives without warning.
SMART on a SATA SSD reports flash consumption well — Wear Leveling Count, Total LBAs Written, reallocated block counts. Those are genuine measurements and they were probably telling the truth.
What they do not describe is the health of the controller: a small processor running firmware, maintaining the mapping tables that translate logical addresses to physical flash locations, managing wear levelling and garbage collection continuously. When that fails it fails completely, and no attribute counts up beforehand.
So a drive at 4% wear disappearing overnight is not a contradiction. It is the commonest serious SSD failure behaving exactly as it does — and it is why backup strategy on solid-state storage cannot rely on noticing deterioration.
All free, and two of them occasionally resolve it.
SATA cables and ports fail, and the symptom is identical to a dead drive. Two minutes, no risk.
1MB, 2MB or 8MB is not a dead drive — it is the controller in a fallback state because it cannot load its firmware or mapping tables. The flash behind it is usually intact.
Separates a drive fault from a controller, driver or motherboard fault on the host side.
Absent entirely, present at the wrong size, or present and unreadable are three different diagnoses. Repeated power cycling achieves nothing and can prompt further writes.
Worth stating clearly, because manufacturer tooling encourages it.
Where a drive is misbehaving, updating its firmware looks like the obvious remedy and manufacturer utilities actively suggest it. On a drive already in a fallback state it is the wrong move.
A firmware update rewrites the service area — the exact region a recovery needs to read in order to reach the mapping tables. Where that area is already damaged, the update can fail partway and leave the drive in a worse and sometimes permanent condition. The same applies to secure erase and to any manufacturer ‘repair’ or ‘restore’ function.
Keep firmware current on healthy drives, as preventative maintenance. Do not reach for it as a fix once a drive has started behaving strangely.
Because the flash is intact behind a layer that stopped answering.
Manufacturers build a diagnostic mode into their controllers that bypasses the normal interface. Reached that way, the service area can be read directly — including the translation tables mapping logical addresses to physical flash. Those tables are the whole job: without them the NAND is undifferentiated data, because wear levelling means the physical layout bears no relation to the logical one.
Where the controller cannot be revived at all, the flash can sometimes be read directly, de-interleaved and ECC-corrected. That is slower, riskier, and on many modern drives returns data the controller had encrypted — a perfect copy of something unreadable. Which is why reviving the controller is always attempted first.
Two things can still end it: TRIM, which physically erases deleted blocks within minutes on a powered drive, and encryption without a password. Both are established at the free diagnostic. SSD and NVMe recovery in Manchester is from £300 +VAT, with a 50% deposit for controller-level work.
Usually the controller rather than the flash. The NAND holding your data is generally intact behind a layer that stopped answering, and it can often be reached in the manufacturer’s diagnostic mode and imaged read-only.
Because SMART measures flash wear, not controller health — two different subsystems. The wear figures were probably accurate; they simply describe something other than what failed.
No. A firmware update rewrites the service area, which is the exact region a recovery needs to read. On a drive already in a fallback state the update can fail partway and make the condition permanent. The same applies to secure erase.
That the controller is in a deliberate fallback state, not that the flash has gone. No drive is manufactured at that size — it is a placeholder presented when the controller cannot load its firmware or mapping tables.
Rarely from a drive that was still working, because TRIM erases those blocks physically within minutes. A drive that has already failed cannot run TRIM, which is why failure sometimes preserves what continued health would have destroyed.
From £300 plus VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic, with a 50% deposit for controller-level work. If the diagnostic shows the data is unreachable — TRIMmed or encrypted without a key — you are told then, not after an invoice.