Devices · solid-state & NVMe
There is no click, no grinding warning. An SSD is simply there one morning and gone the next — behind it, a dead controller, corrupted firmware, or the power going out mid-write. WD and Crucial drives make up most of what arrives here. The work happens down at the flash, and nothing pays like being early.
Run the problem past an engineer
0800 6890668
| What appears | What's behind it | First move |
|---|---|---|
| The drive shows up as SATAFIRM S11 | That name is the tell: a Phison controller sitting in ROM mode | Keep the maker's utility away from it |
| The BIOS lists no SSD at all | Controller or firmware, not memory — the files are still on the chips | Bench work at chip level |
| Reported capacity is 0GB, or something absurd | Its flash translation layer (FTL) is broken | No more restarts |
| SMART health drops off a cliff | Genuine wear, or firmware reporting nonsense | Read the maker's notice, then image |
| 0x800701E3 on an SSD volume | A read has failed in the hardware itself | Image it; leave repair tools alone |
| Boot device not found, straight after a firmware update | The update died part-way and took the drive with it | Keep the power off |
Every item gets its own case number on the day it lands here. An engineer traces the fault, gives you a plain assessment of what is realistically recoverable, and puts one fixed price in writing. The diagnosis is free, you are under no obligation, and chargeable work starts only when you say go.
A failing SSD retreats further with every power cycle. We bring it up through a controlled service mode — from there the flash answers to us, not to firmware that has stopped coping.
If the controller refuses to cooperate, the chips are read straight out and the translation layer is rebuilt in code. That table is what turns a raw dump into folders you can actually open.
Wear levelling spreads a single file over every die on the board, so the pieces are put back in sequence, the file system is rebuilt, and the result is checked line by line against a listing.
You get the full list of recovered files first, and nothing is charged until you approve it. Data goes back on fresh media, return postage paid, and the job stays open on our side until you confirm every file opens at your end.
Where the risk actually sits: a firmware update rewrites the part of the drive that knows where everything is, and one interrupted by a power cut leaves nothing to fall back on. Most install fine — but copy the drive off first, and never run one on a drive already misbehaving.
A firmware flash went bad and took out the laptop's system SSD. In technical mode we put the translator tables back together, and a photographer's decade of edited catalogues returned intact.
Possibly — but only with the power off immediately. TRIM means an SSD wipes deleted data on its own in the background, which no hard drive does. Every minute it runs, more disappears. This is the one time pulling the plug is right.
Rarely. When a drive stops appearing, the fault is nearly always the controller or its firmware — the NAND holding your files is intact. Read those chips directly and most of it comes back.
Different, not worse. A hard drive fails in its moving parts; an SSD fails in its controller and firmware. That calls for other tools — and where TRIM hasn't already run, the odds are good.
Yes. Soldered flash falls under our laptop and Mac work — identical chip-level technique, worked on the board itself.
Switch a failing device on again and you lose a little more. Open a case before you do — the diagnosis is free, whatever it finds.