Before assuming the drive is dead, take five minutes to rule out your computer. Loose M.2 cards, silent SATA cable failures, and firmware that hides drives can make a good SSD appear as if it has died. Once you have exhausted these possibilities, here's how to interpret the symptoms you've identified.
The controller has lost communication. The most common type of failure by far, and the data on the NAND itself is typically still intact. To reach the data, we will need to go into vendor mode or read the memory directly.
The solid state drive (SSD) has lost or corrupted the table(s) explaining how it physically organises itself. Such an issue is the result of a firmware problem rather than actual physical damage, and is often one of the more recoverable cases.
Hardware works, file system doesn't. Least expensive class and most likely to be damaged when you accept Windows' “format” / “initialise” offer.
In cases where the controller itself does not respond, there are two methods available to access the stored data. The first is vendor mode, a manufacturer-specific “engineering” interface through which we can review/repair the controller's own firmware and the translation tables used by the controller to interpret your data. Since in this case the drive is able to reconstruct its own data from what is stored on it, this is the preferred method.
When a controller fails completely, we have to bypass the controller and read the NAND (the non-volatile memory chips) directly. The memory chips are accessed and the raw flash is extracted; after that, the data is reconstructed by performing operations that reverse those done to it by the failed controller: wear levelling, interleaving, XOR scrambling and error correction. All of these operations can differ depending upon the manufacturer of the controller and/or the version of its firmware.
The hard part is putting it back together (that's why SSD work is not simply plugging chips in) because if the controller's arrangement is not reversed properly, raw NAND will look like static noise.
The price for SSD and NVMe recovery is from £300 +VAT. We charge the same for direct NAND reads as for vendor-mode work; this pricing is established at diagnostic by fault type, regardless of how involved the work turns out to be.
There's very little chance of a committed parts cost on our solid-state work, unlike mechanical work, so on nearly all of it you only pay if we recover your data.
You don't get any warning from solid state, but SMART does provide reasonable data on flash wear, and virtually nothing about the controller's health. It is the controller that usually fails. There was no sign for you to miss.
Yes, for the great majority of failures. This is due to the fact that it is the controller/firmware that fails, rather than the NAND flash where the data is stored. Thus, your data still exists in a physical sense but cannot be accessed normally due to the failure of the controller/firmware.
No. Initialising the disk creates a new partition table and removes the existing table used to locate your files. When Windows indicates it cannot read a disk, that is exactly what a recoverable error looks like.
A lot. Several NVMe SSDs are encrypted with the default setting. If you have the password/key, it does not matter; without either one, there is no way into the drive, regardless of how good the health of the NAND may be.
No. The only drives we attempt to recover are those which can be physically removed from a computer. Therefore, an SSD which is soldered onto a laptop or Mac board is not something we recover. In addition, for Apple T2 and Apple Silicon computers, the key is also permanently stored in a security chip located on that same board.
Typically 3-10 working days. Recovery through vendor mode typically occurs faster than through a direct read of NAND due to the fact that we must reverse engineer the organisation of the data arranged by the controller prior to being able to make use of it.
We do our own controller, firmware and chip-level recovery and provide a complimentary written diagnosis to start with. Also, in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Begin your recovery today.