SSD data recovery UK-wide is what tracked post buys you, though most of what lands on this bench starts closer to home — the SATA drive out of a Heslington student's laptop, the M.2 from a Clifton Moor office machine, dead between one boot and the next with no noise and no warning. If nothing on your PC can even see the drive any more, that's normal. It's usually still full.
Every ssd job is diagnosed free. The quote turns up fixed, in writing, before a screwdriver is lifted.
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.
First job on any ssd is putting the symptoms against the fault — after twenty-odd years, these twenty-five account for nearly everything that comes through the door.
Its management chip resigns and the drive leaves the bus, NAND intact behind it with every file aboard. What's missing is a spokesman, and we supply one.
That alias means a Phison controller stuck in its boot loader. Files untouched behind the wrong name; service-mode work walks them out.
Translator down. The drive stays polite while fibbing about its size — rebuilt in service mode, then imaged in full.
Boot ROM, power rail or controller: three culprits sharing one blank screen. The rig picks out which.
End-of-life protection has frozen writes. A nuisance at a desk; on an imaging rig, frankly, a favour.
Flash rarely writes a warning letter first. Sudden and total is its house style, which is why 'it was fine yesterday' opens so many of our calls.
Mid-write interruptions garble the translation tables; a genuine surge takes the power stages along too. We meet both every week.
Worn cells answer differently each pass while SMART grumbles quietly. The first full image becomes the only account worth believing.
Deleted blocks get background-erased whenever current flows. Kill the power and the countdown pauses; leave it plugged in and it doesn't.
Thin boards lose arguments with upgrade tools and stiff envelopes. Track repair where the break allows; chip-off where it doesn't.
First-run examples chewed reallocated sectors at a rate Samsung's warranty team can quote from memory. The NAND still reads; we rebuild the map.
WD's SATA Blue has a documented liking for vanishing off the bus until firmware attention arrives. Familiar patient, familiar cure.
A400-class units shrink to megabytes or disappear when their map corrupts. Service-mode territory; the flash beneath rarely shares the blame.
SSD Plus drives freeze mid-write and drop all further conversation. Woken through service mode, or read chip-off when they won't be.
SSUBX and SSPOLARIS blades out of 2013–2017 machines fail like any SSD and image here on native adapters, no donor Mac involved.
No DRAM means clumsy wear-levelling, and heavy duty bricks Crucial's budget drive early. Off come the chips; out comes the data.
Marketplace fakes loop writes over a sliver of real flash until nothing mounts. What genuinely landed inside the honest region carves out.
The SATA tab shears during a routine swap. Board-level repair, after which the drive behaves as if nothing was ever wrong.
Years of heavy duty exhaust the rated TBW and the drive locks or wobbles. One imaging attempt is the budget, so it gets planned like one.
The vendor's utility died mid-flash and left the drive speechless. Reflashed on the rig — or bypassed entirely, silicon willing.
QLC out of fast cache slows to single figures mid-copy; owners assume a hang and pull the lead. The crawl is by design. The aftermath isn't.
Cells leak in storage, and a drive unpowered since 2019 may read back mush. ECC-patient, repeated-read imaging recovers what a quick pass would bin.
Seasons of expansion and contraction crack BGA joints under NAND and controller. Rework restores contact long enough for a clean image.
More than one vendor has shipped firmware that bricks at a set power-on-hours figure. The hour lands, the drive doesn't. Repaired in service mode, then imaged.
A glitched security state seals a self-encrypting drive. The PSID code on the label reverts it — by erasing everything. So we don't, and neither should you.
An SSD keeps nothing in one place: the controller scatters your files across NAND chips and holds the only map of the arrangement in its firmware. When the controller dies or the map corrupts, the drive simply stops appearing anywhere — yet the chips behind it sit holding everything, unbothered. Two roads back in: wake the controller through the maker's hidden service mode, or read every chip raw and rebuild the map in software. Both get walked here most weeks. Neither is a job for recovery utilities, which need a drive that answers.
Samsung, Kingston, SanDisk, Crucial, WD, Intel, plus the removable Apple blades — 2.5-inch SATA, mSATA or M.2, it makes no odds: if it unplugs and posts, it qualifies. Two flat refusals, stated now because we'd rather disappoint you before the postage than after: storage soldered to a motherboard, and phones or tablets of any kind — neither is work we do. TRIM and encryption make a few of these jobs harder than they look, and you'll be told so at assessment, not discover it on the invoice. The regulars from York offices are the same three drives every PC builder fits — 870 EVOs, MX500s, A400s — and we know their failure habits by heart.
From the first minute, solid-state recovery is firmware and chip work. The rig list was chosen accordingly:
Coaxes a silent drive up in its maker's service mode — firmware righted, translator rebuilt — then takes a complete image before the drive is asked to do anything else.
Stalling drives get hardware-enforced timeouts and a retry strategy chosen for the patient on the rig, not copied out of a handbook.
A native connector for each removable solid-state format, 2230 stubs and Apple blades among them. USB caddies of hope form no part of the chain.
When service mode cannot wake the controller, the packages come off and are read one by one. The scenic route, same destination.
Interleave, XOR and ECC decoded from bare dumps until the mapping exists again in software, and the volume follows it out.
Scorched power circuitry and cracked boards put right first. Nobody images a drive that browns out halfway — not twice, anyway.
Each of those part numbers booked its own place. Early 990 PRO firmware downgraded its health readout at a startling clip until the patch — unpatched examples still surface; the QVO's post-cache crawl gets it unplugged mid-write by the impatient; the SA510 favours the quiet exit; and the NV2 is a raffle of controllers and NAND that picks our method for us. If it unplugs — 2.5-inch, mSATA, M.2 — it's workable here, drives locked read-only by their own safeties included. Two things aren't: flash soldered into a motherboard, and any phone or tablet whatsoever.
Nearly every job on our bench arrived by tracked, insured post — it's the quickest, safest route in. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send or hand in.
Is the drive still inside a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Take the hard drive or SSD out first and post the bare drive on its own — removing drives from machines isn't a service we offer. Storage that's soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, certain slim laptops) is the one thing we can't work on: if it doesn't come out, it can't come in.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Address the parcel for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery — about 40 minutes from York via the A64 and A1(M), or next working day by tracked post. You'll hear from us the moment it's booked onto the bench.
Not certain what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or run the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, a fixed written figure, no fix no fee on most work — start online or ring the freephone.