Every SSD has a gatekeeper: the controller chip that stands between your computer and the flash that actually holds your files. When an SSD “dies”, nine times out of ten the flash is fine — the gatekeeper has stopped answering the door. Recovery is the art of getting past it, and it is nothing like hard drive work.
Spinning drives complain before they fail; solid state does not. There is no click to hear and no slowdown to notice — the controller hits a fault, drops into a protective panic state or simply stops, and the drive vanishes: no drive letter, no BIOS entry, sometimes a bogus 0 GB or a wrong model name. People assume catastrophic loss precisely because the silence feels total.
It usually isn’t. The NAND chips behind the controller hold your data in exactly the state it was last written. What died is the translator, and translators can be worked around.
The first door is technological: many controllers can be forced into a factory or “safe” mode where they answer engineering commands even though they refuse normal ones. From there the drive can often be imaged whole. When that door is welded shut, the second one opens the hard way: the NAND is read directly, chip by chip, and your files are rebuilt from the raw dump — solving the controller’s scrambling, interleaving and wear-levelling in software.
That second route is genuine specialist work, and it is why an undetected SSD is a lab job rather than a software job. There is nothing for software to scan: no drive, no scan.
One more thing hard drives never taught anyone: TRIM. When files are deleted on a healthy SSD, the drive itself quietly erases the underlying flash in the background to stay fast — which means deleted-file recovery on SSDs has a real clock on it, and a drive that flickers back to life briefly can finish that erasing while you watch. If the data matters, resist the reconnect-and-hope cycle. Power it off; bring it in.
A single drive — internal, external, laptop or desktop — is a fixed £300 + VAT, whatever the fault turns out to be. Chip-level exceptions are rare and always quoted in writing first. Every job starts with a free diagnostic and ends the same way it was quoted: the figure goes in writing before a single sector is read, and on most jobs there is nothing to pay unless your data comes back. No hourly meter, no surprise “evaluation fee”, no percentage of what the files are worth.
Rarely. Total invisibility is the signature of a failed or panicked controller, and the flash behind it is normally intact. We reach it either through the controller’s engineering mode or, failing that, by reading the NAND directly. What genuinely hurts the odds is repeated power-cycling, so stop testing and send it.
That’s the controller answering with its fallback identity — firmware has faulted and the drive is telling you its safe-mode name instead of its real one. It looks alarming and is usually one of the more recoverable SSD states, because the drive is at least still talking. Don’t initialise it when Windows offers; that overwrites structures we need.
Sometimes — honestly, less often than on a hard drive, because TRIM may already have erased the flash beneath them. The odds depend on how quickly the drive was powered down and whether TRIM was active. We’ll assess it for free and tell you the truth about your chances before any money moves.
Yes — SATA 2.5″, mSATA, M.2 in both flavours and PCIe NVMe, plus the awkward proprietary modules some ultrabooks use. The interface changes the tooling, not the principle: get past the controller, image everything once, rebuild from the copy.
Two honest routes, no vans. Hand the device in at Tay House, 300 Bath Street — right at Charing Cross, two minutes off the M8 — Monday to Friday, 9am–5:30pm. Or wrap it well and send it by insured, tracked post from Paisley, Ayrshire, the Highlands or anywhere else in the UK. Either way the work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
The bench serves the whole country, not just the west: data recovery UK-wide by insured post, with the same free diagnostic, the same fixed figure in writing, and the same no-recovery-no-fee promise as walking through the door.
EVO SSDs, T-series portables and the old Spinpoint drives — what fails, and what can be done. Read it →
Stop the power-cycling experiments and let the diagnostic do its job — free, honest, and specific about which door your controller has left open. SSD data recovery in Glasgow, at Charing Cross or by post from anywhere in the UK.