Devices · SSD & NVMe drives
No sound, no warning light. It shuts down fine on Friday; by Monday the BIOS has no idea the drive exists. Three causes cover nearly all of it — a controller that has died, firmware that has corrupted itself, or the power going during a write. Most of what reaches us from Cardiff carries a Western Digital or a Crucial label. We work at the flash, and the sooner it arrives the better.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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| What shows up | What has gone wrong | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| The drive reports itself as SATAFIRM S11 | Just one cause — a Phison controller that has reverted to its ROM | Do not run the maker's utility |
| The BIOS lists nothing | Nearly always the controller or the firmware; the NAND behind it is fine | Work at the chip level |
| It shows 0GB, or some capacity that is plainly wrong | The flash translation layer, the FTL, has collapsed | No more reboots |
| SMART health collapses overnight | Genuine cell wear, or a controller reporting rubbish | Check the maker's notice, then take an image |
| Reads fail with 0x800701E3 | The fault sits in the hardware | Image it, and run no repair tools |
| After a firmware update: Boot device not found | The firmware write stopped part-way, leaving nothing bootable | Leave the power off |
The diagnosis costs you nothing. Every item that arrives is logged under a case number of its own, and an engineer works out what has actually failed — then tells you plainly which files can come back and which cannot. The price follows that: one fixed figure, in writing, and no work begins until you have read it and said go ahead.
A drive in trouble loses a little more ground every time it is switched on. We bring it up in a controlled service mode instead, so the flash answers to the bench directly rather than to firmware that has stopped coping.
If the controller stays silent, we lift the flash contents directly and rebuild the translation table in software. On its own a raw dump is just noise. Restore the table and your folders come back into view.
Wear levelling scatters a single document across every die on the board; that is exactly what it is there for. We reassemble the pieces in order, rebuild the volume, and tick each entry off against the listing.
Nothing is billed while you are still deciding. A complete listing of what came off the drive reaches you first, and the invoice only follows your yes. Files travel back on media bought new for the job, return postage ours, and we do not close it here until every one of them opens on the machine you will use.
One risk worth knowing about: a firmware update rewrites the area that records where each file lives, and if the power goes mid-way there is no earlier copy underneath to fall back on. Nearly all updates go through cleanly. Copy the drive off before you start one, and if it is already misbehaving, leave the update well alone.
The laptop's system SSD stopped part-way through a firmware update and would not read afterwards. Working in technical mode, an engineer rebuilt the translator tables, and ten years of one photographer's edited catalogues came back intact.
Maybe, if you shut the machine down in the next few minutes rather than tonight. An SSD runs TRIM on its own initiative: the blocks behind a deleted file get scrubbed while the drive sits there powered up, and no spinning disk behaves that way. This is the rare case where pulling the plug is the right move.
Seldom. When a drive goes quiet, the controller or the firmware has failed, and the NAND sitting behind them is generally untouched. Read those chips on the bench and the bulk of it turns up again.
Different, rather than harder. A hard disk fails in the parts that move; an SSD fails in its controller and the tables that controller keeps. As long as TRIM has not already swept through, your chances are good.
We take those too. They run alongside the Mac and laptop jobs: the same work on the flash, only with the chips read where they sit.
A failing drive has only so many starts left in it. Spend none of them. Keep the power off, and the free diagnosis will tell you what is still readable.