In today's world, most modern laptops and PCs use NVMe as their fastest form of storage. However, when an M.2 stick fails, it fails instantly and with no warning. Since this type of failure occurs so quickly, you may not even see anything on your screen. We provide recovery services for NVMe drives from every manufacturer.
Free diagnostic on every NVMe job. Also included as part of our process is one fixed quote, given to the customer in writing before any work is carried out.
On most jobs, you only pay if we recover your data. For electronic, mechanical and chip-level work, we'll take half up front and the rest only if we're able to recover your data. Jobs involving BitLocker, ransomware, forensic or CCTV/DVR work are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote. Complete pricing can be found on the data recovery cost page.
To begin the recovery process on any NVMe job, we first need to match the symptoms to the fault. Below are ten faults that cover almost everything that reaches our bench.
If the controller or firmware on the drive becomes faulty, it will drop the drive off the bus, essentially dropping the connection. The drive is there one boot and is no longer seen the next. All of the user's data remains stored on the drive, however.
Faulty power circuitry, damaged boot firmware or a dead controller: the NAND usually still stores all of your data.
Corrupted translator: the drive responds but reports a nonsense size instead of your data.
The system NVMe has dropped out, but the user's documents can be recovered directly from the drive.
NVMe generates heat and will throttle or disconnect without a heatsink. Repeated high-temperature events can corrupt the mapping of the drive.
Interrupted updates can corrupt the tables used by the drive to locate its information. The drive will no longer correctly identify itself.
Flash-based devices (like NVMe) operate flawlessly until they do not. Traditional hard disk drives often click before they fail, but flash-based devices give no such warning.
Thin modules tend to break when upgrading systems or being transported. A board-level repair or chip-off can reach the user's data.
Burnt power components on the module are repaired at board level before imaging.
TRIM clears freed blocks automatically in the background, so deleted-file recovery is a race against the drive.
An NVMe drive is a small M.2 stick that connects directly to the processor via the PCIe bus, resulting in extremely high speeds and an unforgiving nature when failing. Unlike traditional hard disk drives that click loudly before they fail, an NVMe drive gives no warning: it is there at one startup and gone the next. Behind the connector sits a controller running complex firmware over stacked layers of NAND. When either the controller or firmware faults, the entire drive vanishes, despite the fact that all user data is still present in the NAND memory. Data recovery from an NVMe device therefore requires accessing the controller via service mode, or reading the NAND directly and rebuilding the mapping in software.
We perform recovery on M.2 2280, 2242 and 2230 sticks and PCIe add-in cards, regardless of the manufacturer (Samsung, WD, Crucial, Kingston, Corsair, Sabrent, Kioxia and Solidigm), as long as the drive can be removed and sent to us. We cannot recover data from NVMe storage that is soldered onto a motherboard. Common causes of NVMe failure include overheating (NVMe runs hot and throttles or drops out without a heatsink), firmware bugs and failed updates. Regardless of the cause, the diagnostic will tell you exactly what is recoverable before you spend a single penny.
Because NVMe recovery involves controller, firmware and chip work at PCIe speeds, we have designed our bench specifically for this purpose:
Accessing manufacturers' service modes for NVMe drives for firmware repair and translator reconstruction, as well as safely imaging drives that can no longer be identified by the system.
Careful imaging of unstable NVMe and PCIe drives with timeout management and read-retry strategies that standard software cannot match.
Native connections for 2280, 2242 and 2230 sticks, add-in PCIe cards and enterprise U.2, including thermal control for drives that overheat and drop out as a result.
Direct reads of the NAND packages, reassembled in software, if your controller is beyond help via service mode.
Rebuilding your controller's mapping from raw chip dumps into your original files via XOR, ECC and interleave analysis.
Board-level repair of power-fault and surge-damaged NVMe sticks, as well as rework on cracked M.2 modules.
M.2 2280, 2242 and 2230 sticks, add-in PCIe cards and U.2 enterprise drives, with Gen3, Gen4 and Gen5 supported, as long as your NVMe device can be removed and sent to us. We don't recover NVMe that is soldered to a motherboard.
Our customers get a quote first, before sending their media to us, either by telephone on 0800 689 0668 or by completing our free online diagnostic. Once a customer has their quote, they post their media to us, tracked and insured.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the hard drive or SSD from your machine and send us just the drive; we do not offer an internal drive-removal service. If you have a server or RAID system, please send us every disk, each clearly labelled with its bay. We cannot recover data from storage that is soldered directly onto the motherboard (for example Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops), so we need removable drives to be sent to us. If you are unsure which kind you have, ring us first.
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Free diagnostic, fixed quote and, in most cases, you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.