Solid-state drives don’t click or grind — they just vanish. One day the drive is there, the next it reports zero bytes, isn’t detected, or won’t come out of a firmware lock-up. Because there are no moving parts, SSD recovery is a different discipline to hard drives: it happens at the controller, the firmware and, when it has to, the raw NAND memory chips themselves. We recover SATA, M.2 and NVMe drives of every make across the UK — post yours in from anywhere or drop it at our Belfast lab.
Most SSD failures are a dead controller or bricked firmware — the data’s intact on the NAND, cut off by the chip that reads it.
A hard drive stores data magnetically on spinning platters, and it usually warns you before it dies — it slows, it clicks, it throws errors. An SSD has none of that: no platters, no heads, no clean bench. Instead it’s a bank of NAND flash memory chips run by a controller chip and a layer of firmware that decides where every piece of data physically lives. That design is fast and robust in daily use, but it changes how SSDs fail — almost always suddenly and silently, and almost always because the controller or firmware has failed rather than the memory itself.
When that happens, your data is typically still sitting intact on the NAND chips — it’s just cut off, because the controller that knows how to read and reassemble it has stopped working. Recovering it means either reviving that controller and firmware, or bypassing them entirely and reading the memory chips directly. That’s specialist, equipment-heavy work, and it’s exactly what we do.
Dead or failed controller. The single most common SSD failure. The drive disappears from the system, isn’t detected in BIOS, or shows up with the wrong capacity. The NAND is fine; the chip that runs it has failed. This is where controller-level and chip-off recovery come in.
Reports 0 MB / 0 GB or the wrong size. A classic symptom of firmware or controller trouble — the drive is detected but claims to be empty or a fraction of its real size. Your data hasn’t gone anywhere; the drive simply can’t report itself correctly.
Bricked firmware. A firmware bug, a failed update, or a power event can drop an SSD into a ‘safe’ or panic mode where it won’t mount at all. Some drive families are notorious for it. It’s recoverable, but it needs the right tools to talk to the drive in that state.
Power-loss corruption. A sudden power cut mid-write can corrupt the mapping tables the SSD uses to find data. The chips are intact; the index is scrambled — and rebuilding that index is a recovery job.
Worn-out NAND. Flash memory has a finite number of write cycles. A heavily-used or ageing SSD can accumulate bad blocks until it drops read-only or fails — usually with data still readable if it’s handled promptly.
Physical damage. A snapped M.2 stick, a cracked board, a burnt connector after a surge. Even then, if the NAND chips survived, the data usually can be recovered from them directly.
There’s one place where SSDs are genuinely worse than hard drives, and it’s worth being straight about. Modern SSDs use a command called TRIM: when you delete a file or empty the recycle bin, the operating system tells the SSD which blocks are now free, and the drive wipes them in the background so future writes stay fast. On a hard drive a deleted file sits there until it’s overwritten, often for a long time; on a TRIM-enabled SSD it can be genuinely, permanently gone within minutes.
What that means in practice: if you’ve accidentally deleted or formatted something on an SSD, stop using the drive and power it off immediately — the sooner it’s off, the more chance there is that TRIM hasn’t yet cleared the data. We can and do recover deleted data from SSDs, but the odds fall fast with every minute the drive stays powered, so speed matters far more than it does with a hard drive. If the failure is a dead controller or firmware rather than a deletion, TRIM isn’t a factor and the outlook is much better.
Don’t keep using it after a deletion — every second powered gives TRIM another chance to wipe the data for good. Shut it down and send it in. Don’t reformat, run repair tools or ‘initialise’ the disk when Windows offers to; those write to the drive and can destroy the very mapping we need. Don’t reflash the firmware yourself to ‘fix’ a bricked drive — a failed reflash usually makes recovery harder or impossible. And don’t keep power-cycling a drive that’s locked up, hoping it comes back. Keep it safe and let it be assessed — on an SSD, restraint protects your data more than effort does.
Where the drive can still be reached, we work through its own controller and firmware using specialist SSD recovery equipment — talking to the drive in engineering modes to bring it back to a readable state and image it. Where the controller is dead or the drive is physically damaged, we go deeper: chip-off and monolithic recovery. We remove the NAND memory chips (or, on single-chip drives, read the whole package) and read them directly on a programmer.
Raw NAND isn’t your data, though — it’s the controller’s scrambled version of it. So the real work begins after the read: reversing the drive’s ECC error correction, wear-levelling, block interleaving and the XOR scrambling the controller applied, to reconstruct the original data from the chips. It’s intricate, drive-specific work, and it’s the reason so few labs offer genuine SSD recovery. Everything is done on images, never the original chips, so the process can’t make matters worse.
We recover 2.5" SATA SSDs, M.2 SATA and M.2 NVMe sticks, mSATA, add-in PCIe and enterprise U.2 drives — consumer and datacentre alike. Every major make: Samsung (860/870 EVO, 970/980/990 Pro), Crucial (MX and P-series), Western Digital and SanDisk, Kingston, Intel/Solidigm, Seagate FireCuda, Sabrent, ADATA and the rest.
We also handle the trickiest cases: soldered SSDs in ultrabooks and the memory built into Apple Silicon and T2 Macs, and the SSDs inside failed RAID arrays and NAS units. And if an SSD held a crypto wallet file that’s now stranded, that’s a speciality — see crypto wallet recovery.
It begins with a free diagnostic: we identify whether it’s a controller, firmware, NAND or logical fault, and tell you honestly what’s recoverable. You get a fixed written quote and a full file listing to check before any chargeable work, and on most jobs it’s no fix, no fee. Pricing is per case — a firmware fix and a full chip-off reconstruction are very different amounts of work. Because it’s all done by post or drop-off, you don’t need to be nearby: we recover SSDs for clients across the UK and Ireland every week.
Sometimes, but be quick. Most SSDs use TRIM, which wipes deleted blocks in the background — so a deleted file can be permanently gone within minutes, unlike on a hard drive. If you’ve deleted something important, power the drive off immediately and send it in; the sooner it stops, the better the chance the data survives. If the drive failed some other way, TRIM isn’t the issue and recovery is far more likely.
Usually not. A drive that vanishes or reports zero bytes has almost always suffered a controller or firmware failure — the NAND, and your data, are typically intact but cut off. We recover by reviving the controller and firmware where possible, or by reading the memory chips directly when it isn’t. This is one of the more recoverable SSD situations.
It’s reading the NAND flash chips directly, bypassing a dead controller. We remove the memory chips (or read the whole package on single-chip drives) and then reconstruct your data by reversing the error correction, wear-levelling and scrambling the controller applied. It’s used when the controller is dead or the drive is physically damaged, and it’s specialist work most labs don’t offer.
Often, yes — though modern Macs are the hard case. Where memory is soldered to the board we read it in place or via chip-off. On Apple Silicon and T2 Macs the storage is also tied to the machine’s security chip, which can limit what’s possible; we’ll assess your specific machine and tell you honestly what can be done before you commit.
Only for a simple logical fault on a drive that’s still healthy and fully detected — and even then, be mindful of TRIM. If the drive isn’t detected, reports the wrong size, or is bricked, software can’t help and reformatting or re-initialising it can destroy the data. When it matters, it’s safer to have the drive assessed before anything is written to it.
No. Our lab is in Belfast, but SSD recovery is done by post or drop-off, so we work with clients right across the UK and Ireland. Post the drive in with insured, tracked delivery, or drop it off in person — the service, diagnostic and pricing are the same wherever you are.
Send it in or drop it off and we’ll find out whether it’s the controller, the firmware or the NAND, and give you an honest, fixed quote before any chargeable work — no fix, no fee on most jobs.