Devices · SSD & NVMe drives
A solid-state drive provides no warning: it functions on Friday and disappears on Monday. Behind each disappearance lies either a dead controller or self-corrupting firmware, or an aborted write due to a loss of power. Most drives posted in by Maidenhead come from WD and Crucial. All work happens at the flash level; the sooner a Maidenhead drive gets to 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 | This indicates to you only that there is an onboard Phison controller operating in ROM mode | Let no vendor provided tools get anywhere close to this SSD |
| There are no SSDs available in your BIOS | Controller or firmware failure; data remains on the chip(s) | Chip level bench work |
| The reported capacity of this SSD is either 0GB, or is totally incorrect | Your flash translation layer (FTL) has failed completely | Don't keep rebooting it |
| SMART health collapsed overnight | The drive has been worn out by real use, or the controller simply isn't reporting correct information | Image it after you check the vendor's advisory |
| Reading an SSD: 0x800701E3 | A read error at the hardware level | Don't use the repair tools; just take an image |
| Boot device not found; this occurs after a firmware update | After a firmware write fails due to interruption, there is no longer anything to boot into | Never turn it on |
Nothing is chargeable until you say yes. Every item gets a case number of its own immediately upon receipt, an engineer determines what has failed, and you get a clear picture of which files have a real possibility of being recovered. The single quote that follows is fixed, written down and does not cost anything.
Every time you try to power it on, you lose ground on what is a failing drive; therefore the best course of action is to bring it up under a controlled service mode environment, where the memory responds to the bench rather than to firmware which has failed to respond.
If the controller refuses to work with the bench, the memory can be read directly and its translation table recreated within software. Without this table (translation table), an image is simply noise; with this table, all the folders appear again.
Because wear levelling distributes one document across every die on the board, we will reassemble the fragments in order, rebuild the file system and then compare our completed set entry by entry against a listing.
You don't get charged anything until you've confirmed and authorised that everything is fine after seeing the entire list of what was recovered. Any recovered items are returned via brand-new storage media and the postage costs for these are covered by us. We do not consider a project complete here until we receive confirmation that you have been able to successfully access and review every item you received back.
The actual risk: when you run a firmware update, it writes over the section of the flash memory that keeps track of where everything is stored. If a firmware update stops running due to a loss of power, there is no prior version for it to go back to, because none exists. While most firmware updates happen successfully, it would still be wise to copy the contents off of the solid-state drive before updating, and never to update a drive that is already behaving erratically.
After a firmware update stopped mid-run, leaving the system SSD on a photographer's laptop unusable, we were able to repair its translator tables while working in tech mode, and the photographer got back ten years' worth of photo editing catalogues in full.
Possibly, but only if the drive stops receiving power immediately instead of shortly thereafter. While a solid state drive has power, it can delete the space occupied by a deleted file via the TRIM function, a feature that mechanical drives do not possess, and it continues to do so as long as there is still power to the drive. Therefore, unusually, pulling the plug is correct in this case.
Rarely. In all likelihood, a drive that no longer announces itself to the system has failed due to either loss of the drive's controller or failure of its firmware. The internal memory, however, that holds your files is typically unharmed. When accessing the internal memory directly, most of what was stored on the drive should be recoverable.
Different discipline, not a harder discipline. Hard drives fail at their mechanical components such as heads and motors. Solid-state drives (SSDs) fail at their controllers and their respective tables. As long as TRIM has not swept through those areas of memory, recovery prospects remain good.
No. Storage devices soldered to the board (T2 and Apple silicon Macs, soldered laptop flash) are not taken on; if you are unsure whether your storage is soldered to the board, contact us before attempting to send the unit.
Every additional power-up asks for even more of a drive that is already starting to fail. First open a case with us, and let the free diagnosis tell you how much remains.