Solid state drives have no moving parts, so they don’t click or grind when they fail. Instead they tend to fail silently: one day the computer simply can’t see the drive, or it shows up with the wrong name and a capacity of a few megabytes. Here’s why SSD failures are different from hard drive failures and what to do if yours has stopped working.
Common SSD failure symptoms
- The drive is not detected in the BIOS/UEFI or in Disk Management.
- It appears with a strange model name (for example a controller code such as “SATAFIRM S11”) or with 0 bytes or a tiny capacity.
- The computer freezes while booting, or the drive drops out under load.
- The drive has switched to read-only mode, so files open but nothing can be saved.
Why SSDs fail differently
An SSD stores data in NAND flash memory chips, managed by a controller with its own firmware. The controller keeps a translation table that maps where every piece of your data actually lives across the chips. If that firmware or table becomes corrupt, often after a power cut or a firmware bug, the drive can no longer find its own data, even though the data is still sitting in the memory chips.
That’s why an SSD that has “died” overnight is often recoverable: the controller has stopped working, but the flash memory hasn’t.
The TRIM problem: deleted files on SSDs
Deleted files are a different story. Most modern systems send a TRIM command when you delete a file or format an SSD. TRIM tells the drive those blocks are no longer needed, and the drive can erase them in the background, sometimes within seconds. Once that has happened, the data is genuinely gone.
If you have deleted files or formatted an SSD by mistake, power the computer off straight away rather than shutting down normally and leaving it running. The less time the drive has to clean up, the better.
What to do if your SSD isn’t detected
- Stop retrying. Repeated power cycling can cause the controller to try to rebuild its tables and overwrite useful information.
- Don’t update the firmware or run manufacturer “fix” tools unless you have a backup. Some of these tools reset the drive to factory state and erase the data.
- Don’t run CHKDSK or disk repair on a drive that is behaving strangely.
- If the data matters, get a professional assessment before trying anything else.
NVMe and encrypted SSDs
M.2 NVMe drives are recovered in the same way as SATA SSDs, but some are hardware-encrypted, and many laptops now use soldered storage that is tied to the motherboard. In those cases the original board often has to be repaired so the data can be read. Tell us the exact laptop model when you get in touch, as it changes the approach.
Getting your data back
We recover data from SATA, M.2 and NVMe SSDs, including Samsung and Crucial drives, using specialist tools that work directly with the controller and its firmware. Read more about our SSD data recovery service, or call 020 7394 2529 for a free consultation.