NVMe is the fast storage in today's laptops and PCs — and when an M.2 stick fails, it fails instantly, with no warning and nothing on screen. We recover NVMe drives from every maker, sent in from across Staines and beyond.
Free diagnostic on every nvme 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 nvme job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
Present at one boot, missing at the next: a controller or firmware fault has knocked the drive off the bus while your data waits behind it.
A dead controller, failed power circuitry or scrambled boot firmware keeps the drive silent — the NAND behind it usually holds everything still.
The drive replies to the system but quotes a nonsense capacity — classic translator corruption, not data loss.
Your system NVMe has dropped off the map; the documents on it are read straight from the drive itself.
Run without a heatsink, NVMe throttles and disconnects — and each thermal episode chips away at the mapping.
An update cut off mid-flight leaves the drive's tables corrupted and its identity garbled.
There's no click and no wind-down with NVMe — flawless one instant, gone the next, like all flash.
The thin modules snap in transit and during upgrades; board repair or a chip-off read reaches the data anyway.
Scorched power components on the module are replaced at board level, and only then is the drive imaged.
With TRIM quietly clearing freed blocks in the background, recovering deletions is a race you win by powering off now.
Some Samsung NVMe drives drop off the bus after a firmware issue — reached through service mode before the NAND is read.
Known WD Black and Blue NVMe firmware faults cause sudden capacity loss — repaired on the SSD bench.
An NVMe drive is a compact M.2 stick that talks straight to the processor over the PCIe bus, which makes it blisteringly quick and unusually unforgiving when it goes wrong. There's no clicking and no warning — the drive is present one boot and gone the next. Behind the connector sits a controller running dense firmware over stacked NAND, and when the controller or firmware trips, the drive vanishes completely even though your data is sitting intact in the memory. Getting it back means going in through the controller's service mode — or reading the NAND itself and reconstructing the mapping in software.
We recover M.2 2280, 2242 and 2230 sticks and PCIe add-in cards — Samsung, WD, Crucial, Kingston, Corsair, Sabrent, Kioxia and Solidigm — provided the drive can be removed and sent to us. NVMe storage soldered to a motherboard sits outside what we recover. Overheating is a frequent trigger (NVMe runs hot and throttles or drops out without a heatsink), along with firmware bugs and failed updates. Whichever fault yours turns out to be, the free diagnostic spells out what's recoverable before a penny changes hands.
Working on NVMe means controller, firmware and chip work carried out at PCIe speed, and the bench is specced accordingly:
Reaches an NVMe drive through its maker's service mode — firmware gets repaired, translators rebuilt, and a drive the system can't see gets imaged safely.
Unstable NVMe and PCIe drives are captured under managed timeouts and layered read-retry passes that no software tool can reproduce.
2280, 2242 and 2230 sticks, add-in cards and enterprise U.2 all connect natively — with active thermal control for the drives that overheat and vanish.
Where service mode can't rescue the controller, each NAND package is read on its own and the set reassembled in software.
Raw chip dumps are decoded through XOR, ECC and interleave analysis until the mapping — and your files — come back.
Cracked M.2 modules and surge- or power-fault damage are put right at board level before any imaging.
Gen3, Gen4 and Gen5 are all workable, whatever the form factor — M.2 sticks in 2280, 2242 or 2230, PCIe add-in cards, enterprise U.2 — so long as the drive can be removed and posted in. Samsung 970/980/990 drives can drop off the bus after a firmware fault; WD Black SN770 and SN850 sticks suffer known firmware bugs that trigger sudden capacity loss; and any NVMe run without a heatsink can throttle, overheat and corrupt its mapping. NVMe soldered to a motherboard is the one thing we don't recover.
Most customers post their media to us tracked and insured.
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 Guildford 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.