The most common issue we have when we receive a SanDisk SSD Plus for data recovery is because the SSD is not being detected by the computer. This is because the SSD is stuck in a panic state where it is unable to fully load the firmware from the service areas on the NAND chips.
In most cases, with the use of expensive data recovery tools (PC3000 SSD), we are able to gain access to the data by forcing the drive into a kernel mode, loading some firmware through a file and then virtually creating a translator (part of the firmware necessary to access the data). After this, we attempt to clone the sectors of the drive which contain data. Unfortunately, this is a lot easier said than done.
Sadly, in most cases we have encountered, we are lucky to read 30-40% of the sectors without errors, leaving us with 60-70% of the sectors unreadable, somewhat like the image below with about 24% read on the first pass.
After a month of re-reading and banging away at the bad zones on this SSD, we have made huge strides to getting the percentage of readable sectors up to about 71%.
Sadly, this does not equate to 71% of the files being readable. At this stage of the game, it is more like 1% of the files without any damaged sectors. We currently have our read retries set to re-read each unreadable sector 100 times before moving onto the next sector. With each pass, which takes more than a week to complete, we read more sectors, but less than the pass before.
To help put things in perspective, here is a side-by-side of the SanDisk SSD Plus after running for over a month and a Samsung 830 series SSD with similar issues, but better results of more than 99% of the sectors being read.
Even with the Samsung having read more than 99% of the sectors within the files, we currently only have 95% of those files without errors. Again, with 100 read-retries, we forge forward in hopes to get our clients the best recovery results possible.
Take Away
A few things to take away from this blog post.
- SSD may be more reliable than a spinning hard drive, but it is nowhere near as reliable as the internet makes you believe
- If using SSD, make sure you have a solid backup…and verify your backups regularly
- If your SSD fails, don’t be surprised that it could be very expensive to recover, if recoverable at all
Too Late, Now What?
If you have a SanDisk SSD Plus, a Samsung 830 series or any other SSD that has failed, don’t despair. Recovery Force is equipped with the best SSD data recovery equipment used by data recovery labs around the world. Pricing starts at $500 for SSD recoveries, but tends to quoted at our higher rate due to the extreme amounts of time it takes to complete the recovery.
To get the ball rolling, you simply create a ticket on our data recovery support site and then get your SSD to our lab for the free assessment and we’ll take it from there.