A client recently phoned our office after her laptop wouldn’t boot up. Thankfully, the data recovery was successful – here’s how our SSD recovery team got on.
The client removed the solid-state drive (SSD), a 240GB Kingston A400, from her laptop and sent it into our office. It was sent in with its unique job reference number that is assigned when any new job is taken on. This enables devices such as this SSD to be tracked through every step of the data recovery process. The client explained that her while her laptop was booting up, it would periodically power down upon reaching the login screen, and this was becoming more of a common occurrence, which is why she consulted Data Recovery Specialists.
Because SSDs are flash-based storage devices and contain no moving, mechanical parts, diagnosing the problem can be quite difficult. When a hard disk drive (HDD) is opened by one of the hard drive recovery team, there are typically signs of physical damage, to components like the read/write heads and platters. There may also be strange sounds coming from within, such as a grinding/beeping noise Because SSDs contain no moving parts, diagnosing the problem can be trickier. In our class 100 clean room, where all physical data recovery work is carried out, our SSD recovery team discovered there was some physical damage to the drive’s controller chip; it was possible this was caused by a power surge.
Imaging an SSD is much more difficult than imaging an HDD; however, it is possible. To obtain a bit-for-bit copy of the raw data on the SSD, the NAND chips need to be interrogated directly; techniques known as chip-off and JTAG are the two most common. Using our PC-3000 adaptor, our SSD recovery team were able to successfully recover the client’s data. The PC-3000 adaptor is used for SSD recovery from SSDs of most formats, including SATA, PATA, mSATA, M.2, and PCIe.
While SSD recovery is difficult and often takes a lot of time, effort and skill, it is possible, and our SSD recovery team will always do their best to try and rescue your data. If your SSD needs data recovering from it, get in touch with Data Recovery Specialists for a free diagnosis – you will then be provided with a no-obligation quote which you can either accept or decline.
