Solid state drives fail differently to hard drives — no warning clicks, just a drive that vanishes overnight. We recover NVMe, M.2, mSATA and 2.5" SATA SSDs from laptops, desktops and external enclosures across Sheffield.
Free diagnostic on every ssd job. Fixed quote before any work — and no fix, no fee.
Every ssd job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these ten cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
The SSD's processor dies and the drive vanishes — the NAND chips behind it usually still hold everything.
Drives drop into safe mode and identify wrongly (the Phison 'SATAFIRM S11' signature is the classic).
Translator corruption — the drive answers but reports a nonsense size.
Dead controller, failed power circuitry or a corrupted boot ROM.
End-of-life protection: the drive lets you look but not write. Good news for recovery, bad news for the drive.
SSDs rarely fade — they work perfectly until the moment they don't.
Interrupted writes corrupt the mapping tables; surges burn power components on the board.
Worn cells return unstable data; files corrupt and SMART screams before access fails.
TRIM clears freed blocks in the background — deleted-file recovery on SSDs is a race against the clock.
Thin blades snap in transit or during upgrades; board-level repair or chip-off gets the data.
An SSD spreads your data across NAND memory chips managed by a controller running complex firmware. When the controller or firmware fails, the drive can disappear entirely even though the data is still sitting in the chips. Recovery means talking to the drive at a technical level — through manufacturer service modes, or by reading the NAND directly and rebuilding the controller's mapping in software. It's specialist work, and it's what our lab does every day.
Samsung, Crucial, Kingston, SanDisk, WD, Intel and Apple SSDs, in every common format: NVMe and M.2 sticks from modern laptops, mSATA from ultrabooks, 2.5" SATA drives, and the soldered storage in some compact machines. We also handle TRIM and encryption complications and will always tell you honestly what's achievable before you commit.
SSD recovery is firmware and chip work, and the bench reflects it:
Manufacturer service-mode access for SSDs — firmware repair, translator rebuilds and safe imaging of drives that no longer identify.
Controlled imaging of unstable SSDs and NVMe drives with timeout management and read-retry strategies.
Native attachments for every SSD format, including 2230/2242 sticks and Apple's proprietary blades.
When a controller is beyond service-mode help, the NAND chips are read directly and reassembled in software.
XOR, ECC and interleave analysis to rebuild the controller's mapping from raw chip dumps.
Board-level repair for surge-damaged SSDs and cracked M.2 sticks.
NVMe, M.2 SATA, mSATA, 2.5" and soldered storage all covered — including drives locked read-only by their own firmware.
Most customers post or courier their device to us — it arrives next morning, and the free diagnostic starts the day it lands.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. If the storage is soldered in (e.g. Apple Silicon), call us first on 0800 689 0668.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.