Solid-state drives fail without a sound. No warning click, no grinding, nothing to notice until the morning the machine boots to a message about no boot device and the BIOS shows an empty slot. The flash is usually intact. What has gone is the controller, or the tables it keeps to find your files, and the way to the data runs through the controller rather than around it.
Any SSD or NVMe is £300 + VAT, quoted in writing after a free diagnostic that takes 2 working days from arrival. Chip-level work takes 50% upfront and sits outside no fix, no fee.
A mechanical drive tells you it is unwell for weeks beforehand. An SSD works perfectly on Tuesday and does not exist on Wednesday, which is the part people find hardest to take. These are the failures behind it.
The machine posts, the drive list has a gap where the SSD used to be, and the health check that ran last week reported everything as fine. Solid-state drives fail like light bulbs rather than like engines. In most cases the memory still holds your files and the part that has stopped is the controller in front of them.
Many controllers answer an unclean shutdown by refusing every write. The drive appears, the data can often still be read, and nothing can be changed. That is a protection mode and it is a signal to copy everything off at once rather than to reboot and hope. Firmware updates and erase attempts at this point make matters worse.
A 500GB drive turning up as 8MB, or under a maker name it never had, has fallen into the safe mode its controller uses when it cannot validate its own firmware and tables. The drive is not blank. It is refusing to present itself normally, and it takes manufacturer service commands to be talked out of it.
Some families have a signature failure. The Samsung 860 EVO is the one this trade sees most, going missing or dropping to read-only at firmware level, and several Crucial and SanDisk generations have their own version of the same thing. A drive that disappears with no impact and no power event usually belongs in this group.
M.2 modules vanish from the slot when an update stops partway, or when new firmware does not agree with the tables already written on the drive. The board then sees nothing at all in the socket. Running the update again on a drive already in that state is the one action to avoid.
In Apple Silicon and T2 Macs, in tablets and phones and in some very thin laptops there is no drive to remove: the memory is soldered on and encrypted to the machine. That work is outside what is taken in here. If the storage will not unbolt it cannot come in, and it is better to hear that now than after paying for postage.
An SSD is a bank of NAND flash chips with a small computer sitting in front of them. Flash is written in pages and erased only in much larger blocks, cells wear out after a finite number of erases, and no page can be updated where it lies, so the controller never keeps a file where you might expect to find it. It writes wherever is convenient and maintains a translation table recording which physical page currently holds each logical sector the computer asks for. Wear levelling shifts data around constantly to spread the ageing evenly, so that table changes all day long. It lives in the flash and is loaded into the controller at power-up. If it cannot be loaded or rebuilt, the drive has no idea what it is holding, and neither has anything you plug it into.
Recovery programs work by reading sectors. A drive that has not appeared in the BIOS presents no sectors to read, so there is nothing for them to scan, which is why the tools people reach for first do precisely nothing on this fault. It is also why an SSD that is missing is not the same problem as an SSD that appears but is unreadable. The route in is the controller. Most makers build a service or technical mode into the firmware, entered over the ordinary SATA or NVMe interface, in which a loader is pushed into the controller RAM, the original translation tables are read out, and an image is assembled from the flash behind them. It takes equipment and per-controller knowledge, and it is done without writing anything into the user area of the drive.
On a pen drive, lifting the memory off and reading it directly is a dependable last resort. On a modern SSD it very often is not, because most of them encrypt everything on its way to the flash with a key held inside the controller. Read the chips of a drive like that and you have an image of perfectly recovered noise. This is the honest limit of the work: where the controller is dead and the encryption lives in the controller, there is no second route in. Where a drive does not encrypt, or the controller can be persuaded to answer, the odds are good. The free diagnostic establishes which of those you are holding.
Do not run the maker utility and let it update the firmware, because an update rewrites the very structures a recovery depends on. Do not accept the offer to initialise the disk in Windows. Do not run a secure erase, whatever a forum thread suggests, and do not leave the drive powered up in the machine overnight hoping it comes back to life: some controllers use idle time to run their own repair routines, and they can settle on a worse answer than the one they started with. Power off, take the drive out, and let it sit still.
Chip-level and electronic work is not covered by no fix, no fee. The terms set it out in a single line: No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Where an SSD needs work at the controller or at the flash itself, 50% of the quoted price is payable before that stage begins. A drive that still appears normally and has a logical fault stays under no fix, no fee.
Any single SSD is £300 + VAT, and an NVMe blade is the same £300 + VAT as a 2.5-inch SATA drive, despite being a quarter of the size and rather more work to read. Memory cards and pen drives sit in their own band at £250 + VAT. A machine with two drives in it is two jobs. Several SSDs in an array move into the RAID recovery band, from £500 + VAT and rising with the member count. Every figure is fixed in writing after the free diagnostic and nothing begins until you have seen it.
Take the drive out of the machine — a 2.5-inch SSD unbolts, an M.2 blade is one screw and a firm pull at a slight angle — and send the drive on its own. A static bag if you have one, bubble wrap if you have not, and a box that stops it sliding about. It goes to Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, M1 5AN, about 35 miles from the city centre and next working day by tracked post. There is no collection service and nowhere in Liverpool to hand it over, so post is the route for every customer in this network. The free diagnostic reports 2 working days after arrival, and a completed recovery runs from 2-4 working days once approved.
Soldered storage is refused, and it can be refused before you have spent anything on postage if you ring 0800 689 0668 first. That covers Apple Silicon MacBooks and iMacs, the T2 models from 2018 onwards, tablets, phones and a handful of thin Windows laptops where the flash is part of the mainboard. Everything that unbolts is ordinary work: SATA SSDs out of towers and laptops across Liverpool, M.2 blades from university department machines and Baltic Triangle studios, NVMe drives out of small business servers from Speke to Aintree. The device pages are SSD recovery and NVMe recovery, the machines themselves are covered on laptop recovery, desktop recovery and Apple Mac recovery, and if the drive appears but will not open, try drive not showing up. The full list of prices is on data recovery cost.
Take the drive out and post it tracked. The free diagnostic says within 2 working days whether the controller will answer.
Nearly everything on this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a failing drive, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside is normally on the bench the next working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.