A mechanical drive deteriorates audibly over weeks. An SSD gives you nothing: SMART reports flash wear reasonably and controller health barely at all, and it is the controller that usually fails. A drive reporting 96% life remaining on Monday can be entirely undetectable on Tuesday with no intervening event. There is no early warning to miss, which is why the response after the fact matters more here than on any other media we handle.
$ cdr diagnose /dev/nvme0 → Device: Samsung 990 PRO · 2 TB NVMe → Status: NOT DETECTED — controller in safe mode → Client: confidential · Cambridge, Cambridgeshire $ cdr engineer-working → Controller: reached · garbage collection halted → Translation layer: rebuilt from NAND → Imaging: 1.9 TB / 2 TB · 9sectors mapped $ cdr verify → ✓ documents — 19,400 files → ✓ photos — 22,800 files → ✓ drive recovered — data back
The behaviour that most surprises people, and the reason response after the fact matters more here than on any other media.
A mechanical drive announces itself. It clicks, it whines, it slows down, and it usually does so for days or weeks before it stops. That warning is the reason so many hard drive jobs arrive with the data still largely intact.
Solid state offers no equivalent. SMART reports flash wear reasonably well and controller health barely at all, and it is the controller that usually fails. A drive reporting 96% life remaining on Monday can be entirely undetectable on Tuesday with no intervening event, no noise and no warning. There was no early sign to miss.
What follows from that is practical rather than philosophical: with an SSD, the backup regime is the whole defence, because there is no window in which to react. And when one does fail, the first hours matter, since a controller that still enumerates intermittently is a considerably better prospect than one that has stopped entirely.
The flash itself is rarely the problem. Almost everything that reaches this bench failed somewhere else in the chain.
The chip managing the flash stops responding. The drive vanishes from the BIOS, reports zero capacity, or appears as an unnamed device. The NAND behind it is usually completely intact and readable once reached another way.
The drive is alive but has lost the map between logical addresses and physical blocks. Vendor-mode access can repair the tables the drive loads at start-up, which is a manufacturer-specific procedure rather than a generic one.
Rarest in practice, despite being what people worry about. Consumer drives are usually replaced long before the flash exhausts itself. When it does happen the drive typically goes read-only first, which is a warning worth acting on.
Before you pay anyone to attempt a deleted-file recovery from an SSD, understand this one mechanism.
On a mechanical disk, deleting a file removes the pointer and leaves the data where it lies. It may sit there untouched for months, which is why deleted-file recovery from a hard drive so often works.
Solid state does not behave that way. When a file is deleted the operating system issues a TRIM command telling the controller those blocks are free, and the controller erases them — frequently within minutes, as part of routine housekeeping. An erased NAND block is not recoverable by any software, any laboratory or any technique. There is nothing left to read.
So the honest answer depends on timing and configuration. If TRIM has run, no. If the drive was disconnected immediately, if TRIM was disabled, or if the drive sits behind a RAID controller that does not pass TRIM through, there may be a great deal. We establish which applies free of charge, and we would rather tell you it is hopeless than take a fee for looking.
Do not keep using the drive while you decide. Every minute a live SSD stays powered gives the controller more opportunity to garbage-collect the blocks holding what you want back. If a deletion matters, power the machine down now.
With flash the controller matters more than the badge, because it decides whether vendor-mode access is possible and how the data is scrambled across the NAND.
SSD and NVMe recovery is from £300 +VAT, the same as a mechanical drive. Where the controller has to be bypassed and the NAND read directly the work is more involved but the published figure does not change — the price is set by class at diagnostic, not by how difficult the afternoon turns out to be.
No fix, no fee applies to the majority of solid state work, because there is rarely a committed parts cost of the sort that clean-air mechanical work carries.
Frequently, yes. Sudden disappearance usually means the controller has stopped responding rather than the flash failing, and the NAND behind it is often entirely intact. It is reached either through vendor mode or by reading the memory directly.
Probably not, and we will say so before taking any money. TRIM will normally have erased those blocks within minutes of the deletion. If the drive was disconnected immediately or TRIM was disabled there is a real chance, and the diagnostic establishes which.
A controller lock-up, most commonly. The drive has lost or corrupted the tables describing its own geometry. This is a firmware-class fault rather than physical damage and is often among the more recoverable presentations.
No. The failure is nearly always in the controller or firmware rather than the memory. In the great majority of cases the data is still physically present on the NAND and the problem is reaching it.
Not inherently, but the drive is more tightly integrated and vendor-mode procedures vary more between manufacturers. What genuinely complicates matters is drive-level encryption, which several NVMe models enable by default.
That depends entirely on the machine. On most Windows laptops soldered flash can still be read at chip level. On Apple T2 and Apple Silicon machines it cannot, because the key is fused into a security chip on the same board.
£300 +VAT flat, whatever the controller turns out to have done. Vendor-mode access first, chip-level reading only where the controller cannot be revived — and a straight answer at the diagnostic if TRIM has already taken what you are looking for.