When we assess a Liteon LMT-128M6M that our client removed from his Microsoft Surface, it was barely responding. We could only read 256 sectors at a time before having to re-power the SSD so that we could read the next 256 sectors. It took almost 48 hours just to read the 200MB MFT so that we could target the critical files and folders the client needed to have recovered. But, because the targeted data was still almost 18GB, it was going to take several months to complete the recovery.
After almost a week of fighting with the drive, we were able to image all the requested files (with some errors) except the very large PST file which was almost 18GB, on its own. To our amazement, the drive suddenly started to speed up the imaging process when reading the PST file. In fact, we were able to image the remaining sectors of the SSD in about 30 minutes.
The end result, we recovered 100% of the client’s data in less than a week for our minor SSD data recovery price rather than the expected months to recover some of the files for a higher price.
Sometimes we just have to give up on a recovery because there is no light at the end of the tunnel. In this case, our perseverance paid off.