We are hearing more and more talk of SSD drives, how their performance makes a normal spinning hard drive feel sluggish and hopelessly slow. This is no lie, as upgrading your OS drive to an SSD will be the biggest performance enhancing factor you can get your hands on for relatively little money. As with spinning drives, it’s not all peaches and cream – SSD drive do fail, and when they do it’s not pretty.

The success rate for a professional data recovery company should be in the region of 90%. When a hard drive fails the finger can be pointed at any number of components. PCB, head assembly, motor issues, media damage or degradation, contamination, firmware problems, the list goes on as there are so many components that make up a spinning drive. An SSD on the other hand has NAND storage and a controller mated to a PCB, and that’s it. This is an advantage for the most part as these drives run cooler and draw less power as there are no moving parts. They are also almost immune to the day-to-day knocks and bumps that could kill a spinning drive.

Consider the amount of components in a hard drive, all of which play a small role in the bigger picture of providing you with your data. One component fails, it’s repaired or replaced and this usually results in getting your data back. Because they have physical moving pieces they are large enough to work on. Take an SSD, however. There are 2 main components, the controller and the NAND flash. If the controller dies you have no access to your data – at all. The data remains on the NAND, but not in any readable format. The NANDs have to be desoldered, dumped and rebuilt – if possible. Throw in the chance that it might also be running encryption (Sandforce) and you face a hugely complex route to recovery. Or, let’s say your NAND is the component to go, as in the picture below. Well, that’s game over.

An SSD with major heat damage. Picture courtesy of The Register.

So when considering an SSD, keep in mind that data recovery from an SSD drive is many times more expensive than regular hard drive data recovery, and your chances of a successful recovery (if you’re willing to pay that much for it) are a lot less, too.