The SSD that took minutes to open a letter.

It arrived by hand with an NDA signed at the counter before the drive left the briefcase — standard practice here, and for legal work the right instinct. The reported pattern was the significant part: not sudden death but a long deceleration. On a portable SSD, that curve almost always means the flash memory itself is wearing, with the controller re-reading failing cells over and over, taking longer each month to assemble the same answer.

Diagnosis confirmed it: degraded NAND cells across a wide band of the flash, the controller retrying reads until they timed out — the freezes were the laptop giving up waiting. The stalls had a second cost: interrupted writes had left the exFAT file system with damaged directory structures, so even the healthy files were getting harder to reach. Two problems, one root cause, and every further hour of normal use making both worse.

The SSD went onto a hardware imager with read timeouts wound right down — ask once, briefly, move on — mapping the stubborn regions on a first fast pass and returning to them last with patient, spaced retries that give tired cells their best chance. With a near-complete image secured, the exFAT structures were repaired on the copy, re-attaching the orphaned directories. The original never took another write.

Ninety-nine percent of the drive came home — every client matter, the correspondence archive, counsel’s notes — on an encrypted replacement, checked file by file before collection, at the standard £300 + VAT SSD band quoted in writing first. The unrecoverable fraction sat in cells too far gone to answer at all — and it would have been larger every week the drive stayed in service. A slowing SSD isn’t annoying; it’s leaving.