Hard drives deteriorate audibly. SSDs give nothing—SMART reports flash wear well, and controller health barely at all. The controller is what usually fails. A drive showing 96% life remaining on Monday can be undetectable on Tuesday which is why the usual backup advice does not apply here.
Firmware updates rewrite service areas that recovery needs to read. On an unstable drive an update that stalls can leave it permanently unreadable. Secure erase is irreversible by design. If your drive has started dropping out, stop using it.
The reason SSD failures feel so abrupt; and why backup advice for them differs from spinning disks.
Hard drives deteriorate audibly and measurably—reallocated sectors rise, transfers slow down, something clicks. SSDs do none of those things. SMART on a solid-state drive reports flash wear reasonably well: percentage used, total bytes written, spare blocks remaining. What it barely reports is the condition of the controller, and the controller is what actually fails in most catastrophic cases.
A drive may have a 4% level of wear & 96% level of life left on Monday yet be completely undetectable on Tuesday with nothing in between. Therefore, "I'll back it up as soon as it begins to act funny" isn't going to work on an SSD because it won't act funny. It's something to know about before it becomes a problem as opposed to after.
They are very similar — the drive disappears; they are also separated by the diagnostics.
Both encryption and TRIM can shut down a job before the job has even started. Therefore, both encryption and TRIM are established at the diagnostic rather than discovered later.
Many SSDs use encryption by default. Examples include Class 0, TCG Opal, as well as Samsung's portable T-series SSD. Many times BitLocker will be added on top of either of these. If you cannot enter your password or key, you will receive healthy NAND that is unusable. Regardless of what lab tests are performed on the SSD, you will get nothing but unusable results.
Were the files deleted from an active/working drive? TRIM almost certainly completed deletion of those files within minutes, so there is nothing to read. Was the drive still holding the files at the time of its failure? That is very different.
Unbelievably so: if a disk fails, it can't run TRIM. Therefore, all data that continued operation would have wiped out, will be preserved by failure.
Where possible revive controller into vendor mode — the "good" path, which covers most failures. Where it cannot do that, perform direct NAND reads, which requires de-interleaving, correcting ECC errors and unscrambling into the arrangement of the original controller.
The number is obvious. More important is what happens in the conversation leading up to it.
SSD and NVMe recovery is from £300 +VAT, regardless of the type of SSD – 2.5-inch SATA, M.2, NVMe, or a portable one in a case. When we do controller-level physical work, there is a 50% deposit taken, with the balance only if it succeeds; all other types of recovery are cost-free if they fail.
What we want to state clearly is that SSDs give us more "no"s than any other kind of hardware we recover. So instead of paying to find out why your data isn't recoverable, you can have it told to you for free. Data encrypted without a key? Files removed by TRIM from a functioning disk? Storage soldered directly onto a motherboard that is dead? Each of these situations represents a closed book. And therefore each will be identified as such prior to any charge being incurred during our complimentary diagnosis. We prefer to tell you now rather than take a deposit on something that has no road leading to it.
Please send your SSD to us along with some brief details on what the problem appears to be. There is no charge for the diagnostic. Once that's done, you'll receive the price in writing before any further work commences.
The diagnostics don't start until after you send us your drive, packed properly with your contact details inside. There are no costs to have us diagnose your problem. One price quote will be given in writing prior to performing any work.
Posting it? Use a tracked and insured service. The value of what is on the drive far exceeds the cost of postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays from 9am to 5:30pm, and it still needs packing as described above for the journey.
Still unsure if it's worth sending? Describe the problem(s), describe the drive, describe the faults, describe anything else you've tried — every single one of those gets read by an engineer, who then returns with their honest opinion of the likelihood of success and a price range — before you spend postage.
We’ll be in touch shortly. If it’s urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
Technical questions most frequently asked about failed SSDs.
SMART will report for example; how much has been written to flash memory (bytes), how many spare blocks have been used, etc. But it does little reporting about the health of the controllers which are what normally fail. SMART doesn't see a gradual decline in the controllers because there is none, so there is nothing to show as failure occurs.
Not necessarily. When an M.2 drive disappears from your BIOS and shows up as either "blank" or a model number/amount that makes little sense, it is commonly known as a "controller" signature. However, in most instances, the flash memory that the M.2 was using should contain all of its data, and can be accessed through vendor mode.
One way they differ is that when operating in a closed environment (i.e., inside a sealed case); portable SSDs tend to operate at higher temperatures due to having limited air flow / thermal pathways. In addition, many portable SSDs use some form of encryption by default. While the recovery process is the same; the issue of whether or not the drive is encrypted is of greater importance. In terms of temperature; heat is a far more common reason for failure compared to other causes.
Probably not, and knowing this may save you money. On a properly functioning SSD, TRIM will erase the space associated with deleted files well within minutes after deletion. Shutting it down immediately leaves open a small window during which the file data remains intact and can potentially be recovered.
Only as long as the board works. Once it has died – especially when the data is encrypted to the board itself – then there is often no route at all. Please send us the model number and we'll let you know whether you can salvage your SSD before you spend money shipping anything.
A free 48-hour diagnostic is included with our pricing. Recovery is from £300 plus VAT, and controller-level work takes a 50% deposit with the balance on success. If the diagnostic shows that we cannot complete your project, you do not pay a single penny.
What decides an SSD job is the controller, and whether encryption sits behind it — not the brand name. Most SSDs use one of a handful of controller families, and the same recovery route applies to every brand built on each.
Names with an arrow have their own guides, i.e., brand-specific failures and what those will mean for the recovery.
We charge a flat rate of £300 +VAT regardless of which type of damage has occurred to your controller. First, vendor mode access will be attempted; secondly, chip level reading will be used only where the controller cannot be revived; thirdly, you will get a straight answer at the diagnostic if TRIM has already removed what you want to recover.