Devices · SSD & NVMe drives
A solid-state drive gives no notice: it works on Friday and is absent on Monday, and behind that absence sits a failed controller, firmware that has corrupted itself, or a write cut short by a power failure. Western Digital and Crucial make up most of what Maidenhead posts in. The work is done down at the flash, and the sooner a Maidenhead drive reaches the bench the better.
Describe the fault to an engineer
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| The symptom | The likely cause | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| It identifies itself as SATAFIRM S11 | That label means one thing: a Phison controller running in ROM mode | Do not let the vendor tool near it |
| No SSD appears in the BIOS | A controller or firmware fault; the chips themselves still hold everything | Chip-level bench work |
| It reports 0GB, or a capacity that cannot be right | The flash translation layer (FTL) has broken down | Stop rebooting it |
| SMART health collapses overnight | Real wear, or a controller reporting rubbish | Check the vendor advisory, then image it |
| Reading an SSD: 0x800701E3 | The read has failed at hardware level | Take an image; run no repair tools |
| Boot device not found, following a firmware update | An interrupted firmware write leaves nothing to boot from | Do not power it on |
Nothing becomes chargeable until you have said yes to it. Each item takes a case number of its own the moment it arrives, an engineer establishes what has actually failed, and you are given a candid view of which files stand a realistic chance of returning. The single quote that follows is fixed, written down, and costs nothing.
Each power cycle costs ground on a drive already struggling, so it is brought up in a controlled service mode instead, where the memory answers to the bench rather than to firmware that has run out of answers.
Where a controller will not cooperate, the memory is read directly and its translation table reconstructed in software. Without that table a raw image is only noise; with it, the folders come back.
Wear levelling scatters one document across every die on the board, so the fragments are returned to order, the file system rebuilt, and the finished set compared entry by entry against a listing.
Nothing is billed until you have seen the recovered file list in full and told us to go ahead. What comes back arrives on new media, with the return journey at our cost, and the case stays open at this end until you have opened every file yourself.
Where the real exposure lies: a firmware update rewrites the region that records where everything sits, and an update halted by a power cut leaves no earlier copy to fall back on. Most complete without incident. Copy the contents off beforehand all the same, and never update a drive that is already behaving oddly.
A firmware update failed part-way and left the laptop's system SSD unreadable. Working in technical mode, we rebuilt its translator tables, and a decade of one photographer's edited catalogues came back whole.
Perhaps, but only if the drive loses power now rather than later. TRIM lets a solid-state drive erase the blocks behind a deleted file of its own accord, which no spinning disk does, and it continues while power remains on. Pulling the plug is, unusually, right.
Seldom. A drive that has stopped announcing itself has almost always lost its controller or its firmware, while the memory beneath is untouched, and reading that memory directly returns most of what was on it.
A different discipline, not a harder one. Mechanical disks fail at the heads and motor; solid-state drives fail at the controller and its tables. Where TRIM has not swept through, prospects are good.
We handle it. That sits with the laptop and Mac side of the bench: the same chip-level method, carried out with the memory still in place.
Each further power-up asks more of a drive that has already begun to fail. Open the case first and let the free diagnosis tell you what is left.