One of the most common calls we get today is to recover data from various types of solid state media. I’m referring to everything from SSDs, NVMe drives, and USB Sticks, to Flash cards for your camera. And the short answer is – uummm probably.
Electronic storage devices store data much differently than the previous generation of HDD (Hard Disk Drives). HDD drives have been around for decades and until the last few years were the only kind of devices used to store data on your computer.
While still in use today, these drives are typically only used when you need large capacity drives for large amounts of data, usually 2TB and up.
HDD drives are mechanical where a motor spins multiple magnetized disks and a series of read/write heads on a swing arm access the different areas of a drive to retrieve data.
However mechanical drives have many points of failure. The motor can stop spinning, the read/write heads can be damaged or lost, and the worst of all is the magnetic platters can become scratched or damaged due to misuse or a fall. Not to mention that even the drives motherboard may have failing components.
Recovering data from these drives is a meticulous process that I won’t get into now, but expect to pay anywhere from $500 – $2000 to recover data if it’s even possible at all.
Now, what about electronic storage?
SSD, NVMe, Flash media, Memory sticks and so on are all devices that use the latest way of storing data in modern computers. They are fully electronic and therefore have no moving parts. This makes them very fast, very reliable, and have a much longer life expectancy than a mechanical drive.
However, even though the prices have come down substantially, they are much more expensive than hard drives if you want more than 2TB of storage. That’s why you see both in common use today.
Although these devices come in different form factors they all work pretty much the same way. One or more NAND chips are mounted on a printed circuit board along with a memory controller chip. This board will be designed with the interface to the device, and multiple other electronic components to make it all work.
We won’t get into the specifics of the technology, but this is mostly to illustrate the difference from Hard Drive storage.
As I said, these chips are much faster, much less prone to physical damage, and have a longer life expectancy than traditional hard drives. However, they too can fail for a variety of reasons. The most common failures are not actually on the NAND chip itself, but rather on the board it’s mounted on or even other various components on the board. Another issue is over time, memory cells can “wear out” if over used. Manufacturers build logic into the board’s firmware to even out the usage of cells so one group of cells don’t wear out prematurely, however, there is a life expectancy on these types of drives albeit usually much longer than hard drives.
Data Recovery from Solid State storage devices
One major issue you need to understand is what happens when files or images are deleted by accident. When these deletions are done, the firmware issues a TRIM command which permanently removes the file – it’s actually gone and cannot be recovered unless the operating system stores them to a recycle bin elsewhere.
This is quite different from mechanical drives where when a file is deleted all that happens is it is “delisted” from the Master File Table, but the actual file still remains on the platters until it is overwritten by new data. This gives the opportunity to recover files using specially designed software.
Solid state drives can still have data retrieved if other issues have made the drive fail. Often the NAND chip itself is OK, but other small electronic components on the board may have failed. These can often be replaced with micro-soldering. (Extremely fine soldering done under a microscope).
Other common issues are, damage to the connector, water damage, or even a cracked motherboard. As long as the NAND chip is not damaged there is a good chance of data recovery. In severely damaged boards the NAND chip can actually be physically removed to an identical donor board that is known to be working and recovery done from there.
Is Data Recovery Expensive? – Not Necessarily – But It can be.
When hard drives fail and the data can’t be recovered with software, the drive has to be opened for inspection. Don’t try this yourself as this has to be done in a clean room environment not on a desk. In today’s high capacity drives a simple spec of dust can destroy the drive’s ability to work.
Recovery at that point will may involve finding an identical donor drive of the same make and model in order to swap out the defective parts. This is tedious, manual work requiring a specialist. So yes, it can be very expensive.
A simple solution to avoid lost data and expensive data recovery bills – Keep a backup!
This is the thing we talk about all the time bur few people actually do.
When a drive fails (not if), wouldn’t it be so much easier to just say “Restore from Backup” rather than start looking up the address of data recovery shops?
There are many backup plans and strategies you can employ from simply copying important data to another drive or computer, backup to the cloud, or to a backup system that might be available in your office.
Give us a call at The Data Doctor 705-988-5755 and we can help you plan your backup system or, recover your data if need be.