This bench has had all three generations of Samsung storage arrive here. EVO SSDs are installed into about half the laptop computers in the city; T-series portables were also used in many of the city's portable computer bags; and older Spinpoint hard disks were installed in retired towers. All three generations have their own failure patterns, and two of those patterns have a unique feature which you should know about before your Samsung storage device starts to behave badly.
The model number pattern we've seen fill our Samsung search box includes an 840 or 860 EVO that worked perfectly well until a power outage occurred, or the computer crashed with no warning (also known as a "hard" shutdown), or until the battery died while writing some data, and now won't show up in the BIOS at all. Or it will briefly appear for a second or two in the BIOS, and then vanish again. This is the EVO firmware corruption failure pattern: an interrupted write while the controller was updating the drive's internal mapping table caused the drive to lose track of how to boot its own firmware. All of your data is still sitting on the drive in the NAND memory chips behind it. The firmware cannot be booted because it can't find its mapping information in order to boot.
Recovery involves working at the level of the controller: bring up the drive in safe mode or technological mode; rebuild or bypass the mapping information; and read out directly from flash where necessary. There are some things you shouldn't do: there is plenty of folklore floating around (such as repeatedly power cycling it fifty times, freezing it, using reflash firmware tools found on forums). Each time you try something like this, you are taking another risk of making the partially written mapping information worse than ever. Unplug it, and let the SSD bench speak to the controller properly.
Samsung's T-series portables and their SanDisk-shaped competitors fail differently: these portable SSDs do not fail with noise (you can't even hear them). Instead, they fail with heat buildup, stuttering in performance and an unexpected loss of functionality. A portable SSD that runs hot, drops off mid-copy or slows from hundreds of megabytes a second to a crawl is showing stress upon the controller and associated power circuitry or wear on the NAND memory cells which are gradually becoming silent. Our portable-SSD case file (on a competing brand) follows this exact same progression.
Physics dictates that flash wears away and becomes less readable each time it is used. Therefore, the device(s) that slow are those losing readability. The way to capture what portion of a drive remains readable before it shrinks is by imaging using read timeouts reduced all the way down (i.e., "ask" once and then move on, returning at a later time). This is the nature of hardware-based imaging and this is the difference between achieving 99% recovery and simply giving up.
Preceding Seagate's acquisition of Samsung's hard drive business, Spinpoint drives were placed in desktop systems and external enclosures for a decade. Today, Spinpoint drives continue to appear constantly, removed from abandoned towers containing the sole remaining copy of the 2009 photo archive. As with most things, age has brought the three classics: sticky mechanical components due to prolonged periods without being powered, sector-level damage resulting from prolonged use and on occasion a head assembly that fails when power is applied nostalgically.
Be gentle with your veteran drive: power it on once, and if it clicks, whines or fails to settle into a steady spin, that was its last. The old disks can produce good images of their contents, given time and patience once the mechanical issues have been stabilised by the hard drive bench, which handles Spinpoints as routine. However, there is no spare life left to retry the job.
The way we go into an EVO, T-series or Spinpoint is the same. The free online diagnostic identifies the problem and states the chances of success. Our price for this type of recovery is set in writing at £300 + VAT within our single drive and SSD range (this does not include chip-level monolithic repairs, which we would quote first), and on most jobs nothing will be due unless the data is recovered. Once you have a quote, we accept walk-ins Monday to Friday at Tay House, Bath Street, with no appointment needed. Otherwise, insured post covers delivery from everywhere else in the United Kingdom.
All three types of failure (EVO failed after a power loss, T-series was producing excessive heat and dropping out, and Spinpoint started up and immediately began to click on its comeback) are recognised patterns associated with these types of bench recoveries. Free diagnosis and a price of £300 + VAT set in writing first.