Devices · SSD and NVMe media
There is nothing to listen for on an SSD. The machine shuts down as normal and next morning the BIOS shows no drive at all. Three faults account for almost all of it: the controller fails, the firmware corrupts, or the power goes mid-write. Of the drives that come in from around Reading, WD and Crucial badges turn up most often. We work at the flash itself, sooner beats later, and a single drive is £300 + VAT after a free look.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
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| What you are seeing | What is likely wrong | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| It shows up under the name SATAFIRM S11 | Only one cause: a Phison controller sitting in its ROM | Keep away from the vendor utility |
| The BIOS lists no drive at all | Controller or firmware nearly every time; the flash behind is fine | That one is chip-level work |
| Reported as 0GB, or at a size that is plainly wrong | The flash translation layer — the map of where things sit — has failed | Do not keep restarting it |
| SMART health drops sharply overnight | Either the cells are worn, or the controller is misreporting | Look up the maker's advisory, then image it |
| Every read comes back 0x800701E3 | This one is a hardware fault | Copy it first, and run no repair utilities |
| A firmware update, and then Boot device not found | The firmware write ended half done, and nothing boots now | Do not power it at all |
A case number goes on your device the day it reaches us, and an engineer then finds the real fault — free, and before anything else happens. You are told plainly what will come back and what will not, with one fixed figure in writing beside it. Nothing chargeable starts until you have read that and said yes.
Every power-on costs a failing drive something. Here it is brought up inside a vendor service mode instead, which puts the bench in direct conversation with the flash and leaves firmware that can no longer cope out of the loop.
Where the controller will not answer at all, the chips get addressed on their own terms and the translation table is put back together in software. A raw dump by itself tells you nothing. Return the table to it and the folder tree comes back with it.
Wear levelling scatters the pieces of one document across every die fitted, which is exactly what it is for. Those pieces are put back in sequence, the volume is reassembled, and every entry is checked against the listing that goes out with it.
You see the file list first, then decide. Nothing is invoiced until you have said yes, and on most jobs there is no fee at all if the data does not come back. What we pull off goes onto media bought in for your job, and the postage home is ours. The case stays open on the bench until you tell us the files open on your own machine.
Before you take an update: the flashing process rewrites the map that says where your data physically sits, and should the power drop mid-write there is no earlier version of it underneath. The overwhelming majority go through cleanly, so this is not an argument against updating — copy your files first, that is all. But a drive already misbehaving is the last one that should be put through it.
The laptop's system SSD stopped answering during a firmware update, and nothing would come off it afterwards. An engineer went in through technical mode and rebuilt the translator tables until the controller could map its own flash again. Ten years of a photographer's edits opened on the first attempt.
Possibly — but the window here is hours, not days. TRIM is why: left with power, an SSD works through the blocks a deleted file used to occupy and clears them on a schedule of its own, with nobody asking it to. A spinning disk never behaved anything like that. Pulling the plug is almost never the right instinct; on this one fault, it is.
Rarely. A silent drive has usually lost its firmware or its controller, while the flash sitting behind both is untouched. Those chips get read on the bench, and most of what was stored on them comes back.
Not harder, just different. A hard disk fails at the moving parts. An SSD fails at the controller and in the tables it keeps. Where TRIM has not yet been through the blocks, the outlook is decent.
They come in as well, and go through with the Mac and laptop jobs. The task at the flash is identical; the chips are read where they sit rather than lifted off first.
You pay nothing for the look. What comes back is a list — the files that opened, the ones that did not, and one fixed figure to finish the job. Leave it switched off until you have that in writing.