Our SSD data recovery team are seeing an increasing number of solid state drives in the lab every month, and we recently completed a successful data recovery on a WD Green 240GB internal laptop SSD.
SSDs are becoming the standard for most portable devices now, including laptops, tablets and smartphones. SSDs don’t contain moving parts, hence the name, unlike their mechanical counterpart, the hard disk drive (HDD). SSDs store data on NAND flash chips as electrical charges, whereas HDDs store data on platters magnetically. Data from SSDs can be accessed much faster, and are much more compact, which explains their popularity. Despite their apparent flawless nature, SSD users do still lose their data. Earlier this month, a client came to us with a Western Digital SSD that contained valuable academic research, that had been removed from a laptop when it wouldn’t start, rendering it unusable. There was no apparent damage to the SSD itself on inspection.
As soon as the SSD arrived into the data recovery lab, it was catalogued with its unique job reference number that followed it throughout the data recovery process. The client explained that their laptop wouldn’t recognise the C drive in the form of the SSD, and connecting it to another machine yielded no results. When you start up a computer or laptop, it will attempt to find a drive to boot from, typically a hard disk drive or solid-state drive. Our SSD data recovery team inspected it in our Class 100 Clean Room, and were able to determine that the SSD’s controller had failed, possibly due to a power surge. Many people incorrectly assume that SSD’s cannot become physically damaged due to their lack of moving parts. While it is certainly true that there is a reduced chance of physical damage internally – SSDs can’t suffer from head crashes because there are no read/write heads, for example – SSDs are delicate and still sensitive to damage from increased heat or voltage.
In order to recover the client’s data from their damaged SSD, we required a new controller chip, which was sourced from a spare part in our library totalling over 14,000. Once the chip was installed, our data recovery team were able to recover around 95% of the client’s data – certainly all the data they required – which totalled nearly 100GB.
We’re upfront about the cost of data recovery and will always give all of our client’s a transparent, no-obligation quote to get their data back. If we can’t get any data back, you don’t pay a penny. We are able to provide a file listing of recoverable files to let our client’s know exactly what it is that we can recover so they can make informed choice.
