Can Data Be Recovered From SSD Hard Drives?

In this post we’ll be discussing recovering data from faulty SSD type hard drives.

First of all what is an SSD hard drive?

SSD hard drives are a comparatively new phenomenon. Unlike the older HDD type of hard drive that uses rotating magnetic platters to store data, SSD hard drives have no moving parts and instead consist of several high capacity memory chips that, when combined together, provide storage capacities similar to their HDD counterparts. Although the technology behind SSD’s (writing data to memory chips – much like a non volatile form of RAM) has existed for years, the cost of manufacture has made SSD’s prohibitively expensive until recently.

SSD Repair and Recovery

Having no moving parts is an advantage as it means that SSD hard drives will not suffer any of the problems of the more conventional HDD’s that relate to their moving parts. Indeed, a very common problem on HDD type hard drives is known as the ‘click of death’ – this is when a fault develops on one or more of the heads on a HDD hard drive, requiring data recovery companies to open up the drive and replace the faulty heads before recovery can be attempted. You can read about the different types of hard drive failure on this Data Clinic page: https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/hard-drive-data-recovery/.

When SSD’s develop a fault, that fault is likely to be based around bugs in their programming (known as firmware faults), electrical or logical problems. Logical problems usually mean faults with the data itself rather that a fault with the SSD and can usually be rectified with a software approach. Electronic problems are more complex and require schematics of the hard drive in order to safely progress it’s repair.

One of the biggest factors making SSD hard drive recovery difficult is the fact that SSD’s are a new technology – each manufacturer doing things slightly differently. Because of this, there are very few tools available to data recovery companies that allow them to tackle SSD recovery with the same confidence they can approach HDD recovery. This makes choosing the right data recovery company very important as few will have the skills necessary to recover most SSD hard drives.

Links

Data Clinic’s SSD Hard Drive Recovery Information is here: https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ssd-data-recovery/
More About SSD’s on Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive