Solid state drives (SSDs) have soared in popularity in recent years, and it’s not difficult to see why. They’re compact and lightweight, fast, durable, and use less power than mechanical hard disk drives. But data recovery is significantly more difficult.
Many people do opt for HDDs over SSDs due to the price, but very few people consider data recovery when choosing what type of drive to go for. While they are robust and less susceptible to shock and damage like HDDs are, flash data recovery in the event of a failure is much more difficult.
Most of the time, an SSD doesn’t give you much warning before it fails. Unlike with mechanical drives, electronic components don’t begin to grind or buzz as they grow older. They work – and then, suddenly, they don’t. This presents a problem for a lot of people, as they don’t have time to back up their data. There are also a multitude of non-hardware related causes of data loss, including human error, viruses, and software corruption - all of these can leave you with no option but to consult a professional data recovery specialist.
With mechanical drives, data is passed from the controller to the disks magnetically, and written to the drive as bits on the platter. By going back to the same location and reading the magnetic orientation of the bit stored there, the data can be read. Data recovery is therefore much easier to undertake in the event of a failure.
On the other hand, data in SSDs is passed through various complex layers, and in order to prevent the flash NAND chips from wearing out, the exact location of the data is always changing. This is known as wear-levelling, and means it’s difficult to know where the data is located. For this reason, flash data recovery can be incredibly time consuming, as well as costly.
At Data Recovery Specialists, we understand SSD technology and are familiar with the common faults, as well as some of the more challenging data recovery issues. Data extraction tools are not widely available for SSD data recovery, but our technicians, coupled with our research and development team, with their overwhelming experience, state-of-the-art tools and deep knowledge, provide finest and innovative recovery solutions for all types of storage media and file systems in case of data loss.
