I think it is safe to say that the majority of data recovery professionals would immediately jump to the conclusion that the odds of recovering any data from an unresponsive solid state hard drive (SSD) that has a Sandforce controller are very low.  In fact, I suspect that most of us would go so far as to tell the client that it is probably unrecoverable and that there are only a few labs who claim that they can recover the data from these drives; all of which would do so at a price over 2500USD while the majority of SSD recoveries at Recovery Force are done for less than 300USD.

This week, we received a client’s PNY SSD that would stop responding immediately after powering on.  When we removed the outer shell, we discovered that the SSD controller is a Sandforce SF-2281VB4-SPC, a very common controller on unrecoverable SSDs.  Rather than just give up and call it unrecoverable, we decided to try a few things of our own.  I wish I could say that it would work every time, in this case, we managed to get the drive mirroring and were able to get the drive 100% cloned, without any data loss.

At the same time, we are working on an ADATA 480GB solid state data recovery project where we tried to work with the drive with various data recovery imagers, including one specifically for SSD recoveries and it worked out that it works best with our oldest hardware data recovery imager.  That said, the process is very slow and out best estimates are that it will take between 4 and 6 months to complete.

If you are experiencing data loss from your SSD, contact Recovery Force, the experts in solid state drive recovery.