An SSD gives you no clicking soundtrack before it dies — one restart and the drive has simply gone. From laptops, desktops and external caddies across Swansea and South Wales we recover 2.5" SATA, mSATA, M.2 and NVMe solid state drives, including drives no software tool can even see.
Free diagnostic on every ssd 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 ssd job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these fifteen cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
The management chip fails and the drive drops off the bus — with the NAND, and your files, still intact behind it.
The drive boots into a safe state and mis-identifies itself (Phison's 'SATAFIRM S11' being the notorious tell).
A collapsed translator: the SSD responds politely while reporting a size that can't possibly be true.
Controller, power circuitry or boot ROM failure — three different faults behind one blank screen.
End-of-life protection freezes writes; frustrating for daily use, ideal for imaging.
Flash rarely fades gracefully — sudden death with no symptoms beforehand is the norm.
An interrupted write scrambles the mapping tables; a surge can burn the board's power stages outright.
Tired cells return different answers on every pass; corruption spreads while SMART complains.
Freed blocks are background-erased whenever the drive has power — recovery odds fall by the hour.
Thin SATA blades crack in transit and mid-upgrade; board repair or chip-off reaches the data.
Early-batch Samsung 870 EVOs chew through reallocated sectors and fail young — a bench regular.
MX500s (CT500MX500SSD1 and kin) can lose their table after a power event and shrink to almost nothing.
The budget A400 (SA400S37) drops to a few MB or vanishes entirely when its mapping corrupts.
SSD Plus units lock mid-write and never return — service-mode or chip-off cases.
2013–2017 SSUBX and SSPOLARIS modules die like any other SSD and need native adapters to image.
Your files live in banks of NAND flash, orchestrated by a controller chip whose firmware juggles the mapping between logical addresses and physical cells. Kill that controller or corrupt its firmware and the whole drive drops off the bus — while the chips underneath still quietly hold everything. Getting in means either waking the drive in the maker's hidden service mode or lifting the data straight off the NAND and rebuilding the map ourselves. Both routes run on this bench every week.
Samsung, Crucial, Kingston, SanDisk, WD, Intel and Apple's blade modules all come through, in 2.5-inch SATA, mSATA and M.2 form — anything that unplugs and fits in a padded envelope. What we can't take on is storage soldered directly to a motherboard, or any phone or tablet. TRIM and encryption make some jobs harder, and we'll say so plainly at diagnosis rather than string you along. On the bench most often: 870 EVOs, MX500s and A400s — the drives Swansea actually buys.
SSD recovery is a firmware and chip discipline, and the bench is equipped accordingly:
Service-mode entry for SSDs that no longer identify — firmware repaired, translators rebuilt, then the drive imaged safely.
Timeout management and tuned retry strategies pull stable images from SSDs and NVMe drives that stall every ordinary tool.
Every removable SSD format attaches natively — 2230 and 2242 sticks and Apple's proprietary blades included.
Where service mode can't reach a dead controller, the NAND packages come off the board and are read directly.
Interleave, XOR and ECC analysis reassembles the controller's mapping from bare chip dumps.
Surge damage and cracked M.2 modules repaired at board level before imaging begins.
These are the exact drives that fill the intake tray, several with documented weaknesses: early-batch 870 EVOs degrade their NAND and die young, the 980 and 990 shipped a firmware bug that burned write life until patched, and SN550s slow to a crawl once their cache fills — and sometimes never come back. Any removable 2.5", mSATA or M.2 drive is workable — even one whose own firmware has frozen it read-only; a chip soldered to a motherboard isn't, and phones and tablets aren't taken at all.
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.