With an SSD you have a complete lack of audible clicks when it goes down, the drive will just stop working after the next restart. From desktops and laptops to external caddies throughout South Wales and Swansea, we recover all types of solid state drives for 2.5" SATA, mSATA, M.2 and NVMe devices, including solid state drives that no software tools at all will be able to detect.
We give you a free diagnostic check on every single SSD job. One fixed price in writing is given to you before we start doing any work.
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.
When an SSD reaches us for recovery, it is generally because the device has failed. To determine how or why it has failed, every job starts with our technicians looking at the symptoms of failure against each of the possible causes (there are fifteen). These fifteen include nearly every type of failure that reaches the bench.
Management chip fails: drive drops from bus, and your data is still there, intact in the NAND behind it.
Drive boots into safe state and misrepresents itself (e.g. Phison's 'SATAFIRM S11' is well known to indicate this).
Collapsed translator: the SSD responds politely but reports an impossible size.
Controller failure, power circuitry failure, boot ROM failure: three different faults behind one blank screen.
At end of life, protection will freeze writes; frustrating for daily use, ideal for imaging.
Flash memory tends to die suddenly without warning signs prior to failure. This is typical for flash devices.
When an interrupt occurs during the writing process it scrambles the mapping tables of the memory. When there is an electrical surge, it can burn out the boards' power circuitry outright as well.
Cells in flash drives tend to degrade over time causing each read operation to produce different results. The result is corruption that keeps spreading, with SMART reporting errors.
Any free space created (e.g. after deleting files) will have its content erased using the drive's onboard TRIM functionality so long as the drive is powered. Each passing hour reduces your chances of recovering deleted files.
The thin SATA blade (M.2) can break in transit and/or break during an upgrade; board repair or a chip off is then how we get access to the data.
Early-batch Samsung 870 EVOs consume a lot of reallocations and also die early, and they are one of our bench regulars.
Crucial MX500s (CT500MX500SSD1 & others like it) can drop down to near zero capacity after a power event due to losing the drive's table.
The budget Kingston A400 (SA400S37) loses its mapping and goes to either a few MB in size or vanishes completely.
SanDisk SSD Plus units will freeze in mid-write, never to come back again, so they are service mode or chip off cases.
Apple's 2013 to 2017 blade SSDs (SSUBX, SSPOLARIS) die like any other SSD, and when they fail they will require native adapters to image.
The actual storage for your files is located in arrays of NAND memory which are controlled by a controller chip with firmware. The controller chip manages the association of each logical address to a particular cell(s) on the array. If you kill the controller chip or damage its firmware then it will be like pulling the plug out of the back of the drive and the whole drive will disappear from the operating system while the NAND chips themselves still store everything. We have two ways to get into the drive. One way is to wake up the drive in the maker's hidden service mode. Another way is to lift the data directly off of the NAND and rebuild our own map. Each route is used here on this bench every week.
Samsung, Crucial, Kingston, SanDisk, WD, Intel and Apple's blade modules are all sent to us (in 2.5 inch SATA, mSATA and M.2) as long as they unplug and fit into an envelope with padding. The things we cannot handle are any type of storage that is soldered directly to a mother board, or any phone or tablet. TRIM and encryption will create difficulties for certain types of repair work and if this is the case, we will inform you clearly when diagnosing your issue versus dragging out the process. The ones on the bench most often are 870 EVOs, MX500s and A400s, which are the drives Swansea actually buys.
SSD recovery is firmware and chip-based work; therefore, the equipment on the bench reflects this:
Service-mode entry for SSDs that no longer identify: firmware repair, then translator rebuild, then a safe image of the drive.
Timeout management & tuned retry strategies: stable images from SSDs and NVMe drives that stall every other ordinary tool.
All removable SSD formats attach natively (including 2230 and 2242 sticks and Apple's proprietary blades).
When a dead controller can't be reached through service mode, the NAND packages are removed from the board and read directly.
The NAND rebuild suite is used to rebuild the mapping of the controller from bare chip dumps using interleave, XOR and ECC analysis.
Surge damage and cracked M.2 modules are repaired at board level on the rework station, so when we are ready to start imaging they are good to go.
These are the exact drives that fill the intake tray, and a number of these drives have been documented as having issues such as: early batch 870 EVOs will have their NAND degrade and will typically cease operation after a short time. The 980 and 990 had a firmware issue that caused them to burn through write cycles until patched. SN550s will also slow down dramatically when their cache is full, and sometimes do not recover. Any removable 2.5", mSATA or M.2 drive is workable, even one whose own firmware has frozen it read-only. Soldered chips on motherboards, however, cannot be taken, nor can any phone or tablet.
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.