NVMe sticks are faster than any other type of storage consumer machines have ever had, but they also evaporate quicker too (no noise, no warning, you simply get a boot error where your drive used to be): all makers' M.2 and PCIe NVMe drives are recovered here for Swansea and the surrounding towns.
There is a free diagnostic provided with each NVMe job. Each customer receives one written fixed quote prior to any work commencing.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. This is true of all our services except for failure of electrical/mechanical components, chip level repairs, DVRs and forensic analysis. Our full price list can be seen at the cost of data recovery page.
Each NVMe job starts with identifying which of the fifteen faults caused the symptoms; these fifteen represent nearly all jobs received into the lab.
Faults in either the controller or the firmware will take the stick off of the bus between boots (the data does remain intact however).
Either a dead controller, bad power stage or corrupted boot code, and only very rarely bad NAND.
There's been a collapse in the translator, which responds to enumeration with sizes that are physically impossible.
The system stick has dropped out, but the files can be recovered right from the drive.
Uncooled sticks will throttle, disappear under load and corrupt their mapping after multiple events.
The drive will be unable to identify itself after an interrupted firmware or Windows update.
Flash does not keep a diary: perfect function until the time of failure is a normal way for flash to behave.
Slim modules snap during upgrades and in unpadded post, and board repair or chip-off follows.
Components around the connector that have been cooked are repaired at board level prior to imaging.
Freed blocks begin erasing in the background as soon as you delete the file (the final result depends on whether you power off).
WD Blue SN550s are well-known for slowing down once past the cache, and they also arrive in a complete failure state, which makes them service mode candidates.
Although Samsung has patched this wear out bug, it can still catch their un-patched drives by burning through the NAND life early.
Kingston's NV2s are shipped with a variety of controllers and NAND configurations, so each drive's failure mode and recovery route vary to match and have to be determined on an individual basis.
Steam Deck-style 2230 drives fail because they can't dissipate heat in such cramped spaces, but despite the tiny format, a standard recovery method works for the failure.
Kioxia and Sabrent sticks will disconnect from the bus when they encounter a firmware trip, and they are reached by way of service mode.
A PCI Express M.2 stick is a high-speed interface that talks directly to the CPU, great for speed but terrible for failure since there is no mechanical grace period before a failure. The controller runs dense firmware over stacked NAND, and when either the controller or its firmware stumbles, the disk will cease to identify itself, leaving all of the data intact in the NAND. We access each disk via its manufacturer-specific service mode(s) as long as the controller permits us, and where it doesn't, we read from the NAND directly and create a new translation table.
2280, 2242 and 2230 sticks, add-in PCIe cards, Gen3 to Gen5, from Samsung, WD, Crucial, Kingston, Sabrent, Kioxia, Solidigm and the rest, provided the drive unplugs and posts. The one limitation here is that we cannot work with soldered down NVMe. Heat also has its own category: an un-cooled stick under sustained load will throttle, drop off the bus and corrupt its own map after several episodes. Regardless of how this occurs, the free diagnostic tells you what there is to recover prior to committing a single penny.
NVMe jobs represent firmware, controller and silicon chip surgery working together as fast as possible at PCIe speeds. As such we keep our bench running in lock step:
Sticks that no longer identify are placed into manufacturer service mode: firmware repair, translator rebuild, then an image of the stick is taken without compromising the NAND on the back end of the stick.
Unreliable NVMe and PCIe drives are imaged using hardware-imposed time-out controls and retry methods which cannot be duplicated by software.
All types of module lengths (2280 / 2242 / 2230) and all types of add-in cards and enterprise U.2 drives connect directly, with cooling in place for those modules which disappear when they get too hot.
These are used to lift the NAND packages from controllers that service mode cannot help, and will then allow the NAND to be read directly by a reader.
An XOR, ECC (Error Correction Code) and interleave analysis toolset is available for reconstructing the original mapping of the controller and your files from raw chip dumps.
At the board level, we repair burnt power stages and rework cracked M.2 modules using a microscope.
The sticks above are typical of the normal NVMe diet for this bench, and several have some fairly well known characteristics: SN550s will often drop down to almost zero performance (and at times simply die completely), un-patched Samsung firmware on their 980/990 models will chew through your NAND life, and the NV2 is a true silicon lottery, where the controller inside decides the route to recovery. The formats that work here include 2280, 2242 and 2230, plus add-in cards and U.2, Gen3 to Gen5, just as long as the drive unplugs and posts. Soldered NVMe will be our one exception.
First get a quote over the telephone or use our free on-line diagnostic. The majority of customers then have their media sent to us via post, this is tracked and insured.
Do you want to send a drive from your computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please do not send the complete unit of computer or device with a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) inside. Please remove it and only send the drive itself. For a server, please remove all disks and label them by their bay. We will also not perform removal of internal drives from devices in order to access data. Also, we will not extract data from devices where storage is soldered onto the motherboard (such as T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops). Additionally, we do not recover data from phones and tablets, only drives that can be removed and sent to us. If you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Clearly mark the parcel with the name Bristol Data Recovery, and when your media has been diagnosed we will call you immediately.
If unsure about what to post, please call us first on 0800 689 0668 (the free phone number), or complete a free online diagnostic.
Diagnostic provided at no charge. Fixed quote. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.