Recovery Force® Data Recovery Forum

Is there a demand for SSD donor drives or is it usually just HDD donor drives?

There don't seem to be too many DR people who are able to troubleshoot to chip level, so I would think this would limit the need for donors. In any case most of the power chips are able to be sourced from regular IC suppliers such as Farnell, Digikey, Mouser, RS Components, Newark, etc. There are those custom ICs which may be difficult to source (eg PMUs), so they may benefit from donors. But I would think that electronic failures in SSDs would be relatively uncommon. AIUI, swapping controllers between patient and donor is not viable in most cases, and of course there would be no point in swapping NAND flash chips, unless the intention is to repair the unit.

As Frank has basically stated, there really isn't much point. As almost all SSDs now have a direct connection between the controller and NAND chips when it comes to hardware level encryption, you would need to move both the NAND chips and the controller between the two devices as opposed to finding and fixing the point of failure on the board. It would just make more sense to fix the board in most cases.

That said, I can't say that I recall seeing any board level failures on SSDs. There are likely some, but almost all cases are with failing NAND and unresponsive controllers due to translator issues.