A failing SSD gives no soundtrack — it simply isn't there next boot. We bring back 2.5" SATA, mSATA and M.2 solid state drives for Swindon, Marlborough and Devizes, including units so dead that no utility on earth can even list them.
Free diagnostic on every ssd job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every ssd job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
The management chip quits and the drive drops off the bus — while the NAND behind it still holds every file you saved.
The drive wakes into a safe state under a false name — Phison's notorious 'SATAFIRM S11' being the giveaway.
A collapsed translator: the drive answers politely while claiming a size no one would believe.
Controller, power circuitry or boot ROM down — three separate faults wearing the same blank screen.
End-of-life protection freezing writes — maddening day to day, actually convenient for imaging.
Flash doesn't fade politely; total failure with zero warning beforehand is its standard exit.
A write chopped off mid-flight garbles the mapping tables, while a surge can take out the power stages altogether.
Exhausted cells answer differently on each pass, corruption spreads, and SMART grumbles in the background.
Released blocks get background-erased whenever power is present — the odds decay by the hour, so pull the plug.
Slim blades crack during upgrades and in courier vans — mended at board level, or read chip-off past the break.
Early-run Samsung 870 EVOs (MZ-77E500 and siblings) burn through reallocated sectors and die young — a fixture on this bench.
MX500s (CT1000MX500SSD1 included) can lose their map after a power event and report a fraction of themselves.
The budget A400 (SA400S37) shrinks to a few MB or disappears once its mapping corrupts — service-mode territory.
SSD Plus SDSSDA units lock mid-write and never come back — opened through service mode or read chip-off.
SSUBX and SSPOLARIS modules from 2013–2017 Macs fail like any SSD and image on our native adapters.
Crucial's cacheless budget drive wears its NAND unevenly and bricks early under heavy writes — chips read directly.
'2TB' bargains hiding 64GB of real flash loop over themselves; what was genuinely stored is carved from the true chips.
The plastic data tab shears during an upgrade — a board-level repair, and the drive images as if nothing happened.
Write-heavy use spends the flash's rated life; the drive locks or falters, and imaging must happen on the first attempt.
A firmware flash through the maker's own tool dies halfway, leaving the drive mute — reflashed or read around on the bench.
Every file on an SSD is scattered across NAND chips by a controller whose firmware keeps the only map of where anything is. When that controller dies or its firmware trips, the whole drive falls off the bus — yet the chips behind it usually still hold every byte. There are two ways back in: wake the drive through the manufacturer's hidden service mode, or lift the data straight from the NAND and reconstruct the map in software. This bench does both, most weeks.
Kingston, Samsung, Crucial, SanDisk, WD, Intel and Apple's removable blades all pass through here in 2.5-inch, mSATA and M.2 dress — anything that unplugs and fits an envelope qualifies. Two firm exceptions: chips soldered straight onto a motherboard, and phones or tablets, which we don't handle at all. TRIM and encryption genuinely complicate some jobs, and you'll hear that straight at assessment rather than after an invoice. The regulars from around Swindon are 870 EVOs, MX500s and A400s — the same three drives every PC shop in Wiltshire sells.
Solid-state recovery is firmware and chip work from the first minute, and the bench is built that way:
Wakes drives that no longer identify by entering the maker's service mode — firmware mended, translator restored, then a careful image taken.
Stall-prone SSDs are captured under hardware timeout control with retry strategies tuned per drive, not per guess.
Native connections for every removable solid-state format, down to 2230 stubs and Apple's proprietary blades.
When a controller is past service-mode help, the memory packages come off and are read one by one.
Analysis of interleave, XOR and ECC patterns rebuilds the controller's mapping out of bare chip dumps and back into a volume.
Cracked modules and surge-burnt power stages repaired at board level before any imaging is attempted.
These part numbers fill the tray for documented reasons: early 870 EVO batches (MZ-77E500) degrade their NAND ahead of time, the 980 and 990 PRO shipped firmware that chewed write life until patched, and the A400 and SDSSDA both like to vanish into their controllers' default states. Anything removable — 2.5-inch, mSATA or M.2 — is workable, including drives frozen read-only by their own protection. What isn't: flash soldered to a motherboard, and phones or tablets of any kind.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR 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. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
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Mark the package for the attention of Oxford 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.