An SSD that has vanished — no drive letter, nothing in Disk Management, absent even from BIOS — earns you exactly sixty seconds of legitimate DIY, and this page begins with them. After that, every further experiment trades away recovery odds for reassurance you won’t get. The flash almost certainly still holds your data; the controller in front of it has stopped answering.
Check one: the connection — reseat the cable on a SATA drive, reseat the stick in its M.2 slot; loose happens. Check two: another port or machine, once — this rules out the computer accusing the drive. Check three: BIOS — if the drive appears there but not in Windows, the problem is software-shaped and gentler. Three checks, one attempt each, and you’re done: repetition adds power cycles, and power cycles are exactly what a faltering controller doesn’t need.
What never makes the list: initialising the disk when Windows offers, firmware updates on a misbehaving drive, or leaving it plugged in “to see if it comes back”.
Total invisibility usually means the controller has failed outright or dropped into a protective panic state after detecting internal corruption. A close cousin: the drive appears but claims 0 GB or a strange factory name — the controller answering with its fallback identity, firmware wounded but talking. Both share the crucial fact: the NAND flash behind the controller still holds your files, byte for byte, waiting for a working path out.
That path is technological, not software: engineering modes that let a wounded controller be commanded directly, or — when it’s truly dead — reading the NAND chips themselves and rebuilding your data from the raw dump.
Two clocks argue for moving promptly. A controller flickering between visible and invisible may still be running background housekeeping — garbage collection that consolidates and erases — each brief revival potentially tidying away recoverable data. And unpowered, heavily-worn flash slowly loses charge over long periods. Neither clock means panic; both mean this week beats this quarter. Power it down and get it assessed while every option is still open.
A single affected drive is a fixed £300 + VAT, whatever the fault turns out to be; the rare chip-level exception is quoted in writing first. Everything starts with a free diagnostic, the figure goes in writing before work begins, and on most jobs nothing is owed unless the data comes back. No hourly meter, no evaluation fee, no percentage of what the files are worth.
An SSD that vanished overnight often announces itself as no bootable device found on the next restart — the boot-error guide explains how to read that message properly.
Comparatively, yes — BIOS visibility means the controller is alive and the fault sits in partitions, file system or drivers: logical territory, recovered from an image without surgery. Don’t initialise it when prompted; that overwrites the structures we’d use. Imaged and rebuilt, these usually come back complete.
Classic controller failure or panic-lock: the drive hit an internal fault and withdrew from the bus entirely, taking the system down with it. It reads as catastrophic and usually isn’t — the flash is typically intact behind a controller that’s stopped talking. Leave it powered off; repeated restarts are the one thing that makes these worse.
It only re-asks the same question through different hardware — and adds power cycles while doing it. If the drive won’t answer its native interface, an adapter won’t charm it, and NVMe sticks in cheap enclosures can behave misleadingly anyway. You’ve tested enough; let the bench ask properly.
Same band: £300 + VAT for the drive, with the genuinely rare chip-off monolith case quoted in writing before anything happens. The free diagnostic establishes which route yours needs — controller-level or chip-level — and you’ll know the number before deciding anything.
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 anywhere in the UK. The work is done in-house by our own engineers, with a documented chain of custody, and your data never leaves the UK.
You’ve ruled out the cable and the computer — everything further belongs on a bench with controller tools. SSD not detected recovery for Glasgow: powered off, posted or dropped at Tay House, and answered honestly after the free look.