NVMe sticks are the quickest storage consumer machines have ever had, and the quickest to disappear: no noise, no warning, just a boot error where your drive used to be. Every maker's M.2 and PCIe drives are recovered here for Swansea and the towns around it.
Free diagnostic on every nvme job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every nvme job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these fifteen cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Controller or firmware faults drop the stick off the bus between boots — the data sits intact behind the silence.
Dead controller, power-stage failure or corrupt boot code — very rarely dead NAND.
A collapsed translator answers enumeration with sizes that can't possibly be true.
The system stick has dropped out; the files recover straight from the drive.
Uncooled sticks throttle, vanish under load, and corrupt their mapping over repeated episodes.
Interrupted firmware or Windows updates leave the drive unable to identify itself.
Flash keeps no diary — perfect operation until the instant of failure is standard behaviour.
Slim modules snap during upgrades and in unpadded post — board repair or chip-off follows.
Cooked components around the connector are repaired at board level before imaging.
Freed blocks erase in the background from the moment of deletion — powering off decides the outcome.
WD Blue SN550s, famous for post-cache slowdowns, also arrive fully dead — service-mode candidates.
Samsung's patched wear bug still catches unpatched drives, burning through NAND life early.
NV2s ship with varying controllers and NAND — the failure mode, and the recovery route, vary to match.
Steam Deck-style 2230 drives fail under cramped thermals — tiny format, standard recovery.
Sabrent and Kioxia sticks fall off the bus after firmware trips — reached through service mode.
An M.2 stick on the PCIe bus talks directly to the processor — wonderful for speed, brutal in failure, because there's no mechanical grace period. The controller runs dense firmware over stacked NAND, and when either stumbles the drive simply stops identifying, with your data still present in the chips behind the silence. We go in through manufacturer service modes where the controller allows it, and read the NAND directly and rebuild the translation map where it doesn't.
2280, 2242 and 2230 sticks, add-in PCIe cards, Gen3 through Gen5 — Samsung, WD, Crucial, Kingston, Sabrent, Kioxia, Solidigm and the rest, provided the drive unplugs and posts. Soldered-down NVMe is the exception we can't take on. Heat deserves its own mention: an uncooled stick under sustained load throttles, drops off the bus and corrupts its own mapping over repeated episodes. Whatever the trigger, the free diagnostic states what's recoverable before a penny is committed.
NVMe jobs are firmware, controller and chip surgery happening at PCIe pace — the bench keeps up:
Sticks that no longer identify are brought up in manufacturer service mode — firmware repaired, translator rebuilt, then imaged without risk to the NAND behind it.
Unstable NVMe and PCIe drives imaged under hardware timeout control and retry strategies no software can replicate.
Every stick length (2280 / 2242 / 2230), add-in card and enterprise U.2 drive connects natively — with cooling in place for modules that vanish when hot.
Controllers beyond service-mode help have their NAND packages lifted and read directly.
XOR, ECC and interleave analysis turns raw chip dumps back into the controller's mapping — and your files.
Burnt power stages repaired at board level, and cracked M.2 modules re-worked under the microscope.
The sticks above are this bench's regular NVMe diet, and several have well-known habits: SN550s famously slow to a crawl and then sometimes die outright, unpatched Samsung 980/990 firmware chews NAND life, and the NV2 is a silicon lottery where the controller inside decides the recovery route. 2280, 2242 and 2230 formats, add-in cards and U.2, Gen3 through Gen5 — all workable as long as the drive unplugs and posts. Soldered NVMe is the one we can't take.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Bristol Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.