NVMe is the high-performance storage in modern laptops and PCs, and when an M.2 stick fails, it can fail instantly, with no warning and nothing on your screen. We recover NVMe drives made by all of the major manufacturers, sent in by customers in Staines and beyond.
We offer a free diagnostic for every NVMe recovery job. We provide one fixed price quote in writing before we start any work.
In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. For all electronic and mechanical work, including chip-level repairs, 50% is required upfront, with the balance only payable if we recover your data. For BitLocker, ransomware, CCTV/DVR and forensic jobs, full payment is made upfront once you accept the fixed quote. Full details regarding our costs can be found on the data recovery cost page.
Every NVMe recovery starts by matching the symptoms you describe with the possible causes. These twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
The drive was present at one boot, then missing at the next: a faulty NVMe controller or faulty firmware has knocked the drive off the bus while your data sits waiting behind it.
Either the NVMe controller died, the drive's power circuitry has failed or corrupted boot firmware is keeping your NVMe drive silent (the NAND chips behind it usually still hold all your data).
Although the NVMe drive responds to the system, it reports a nonsensical total capacity; this indicates corrupted translators and likely no data loss.
The NVMe drive in your system has dropped out of contact; the documents stored on it can be read directly from the drive itself.
When an NVMe device does not have a heatsink installed, it will throttle and disconnect due to excessive temperatures, and with each overheating episode, there is additional wear on the device's mapping table.
During an NVMe firmware update, something goes awry and the update is cut off, leaving the drive's internal tables corrupt and its identity mangled.
NVMe devices don't make a "click" or slow down: they simply operate flawlessly until suddenly they don't, just like all flash devices.
The thin modules can snap in the post or during upgrades; through board repair or a chip-off read, we get to the data regardless of how they were damaged.
Only when all scorched power components on the module have been swapped out at board level is the drive imaged.
With TRIM, freed space is cleared in the background, and recovering deleted information becomes a race you can win by turning off your computer right now.
After a firmware problem, some Samsung NVMe drives fall off the bus; we reach them through service mode before the NAND is read.
Sudden capacity loss caused by known WD Black and Blue NVMe firmware faults, repaired on our SSD bench.
A compact M.2 stick, an NVMe drive communicates directly with the CPU via the PCIe bus, making it blisteringly fast but also uniquely unforgiving when it fails. There's no clicking and nothing to alert you: the drive shows up as present one boot, and missing the next. Behind each M.2 connector lies a controller that runs tightly packed firmware across stacked NAND, so if the controller or firmware trips, the drive disappears entirely even though your data remains intact in memory. Getting it back requires accessing the controller's service mode or reading the NAND itself and recreating the map in software.
We recover Samsung, WD, Crucial, Kingston, Corsair, Sabrent, Kioxia and Solidigm 2280, 2242 and 2230 sticks and PCIe add-in cards, as long as the drive can be removed and you send us the stick or card. NVMe storage soldered onto a motherboard is something we do not recover. A frequent cause of failure is overheating (NVMe runs very hot and will throttle or drop out if it does not have a heatsink), along with firmware issues (bugs in the firmware or failed updates). Regardless of which type of fault your drive has, our free diagnostic tells you exactly what is recoverable before you spend a single penny.
When working on NVMe, controller, firmware and chip work runs at PCIe speeds, so the bench was designed to perform at those same speeds:
The service mode of your NVMe manufacturer gives us access to the drive: firmware repair, translator rebuilds and safe imaging of a drive the computer cannot detect.
With unstable NVMe and PCIe drives, we capture them using managed timeouts and multiple layers of read retries that no software program can replicate.
2280, 2242 and 2230 sticks, enterprise U.2 and add-in cards all connect natively, and we also provide active temperature control for the drives that tend to overheat and disappear.
If service mode fails to allow recovery through the controller, we read each NAND package individually and then reassemble the data in software.
Using XOR, ECC and interleaving analyses, we decode raw chip dumps until the mapping (and your files) are recovered.
Cracked M.2 modules and damage from a surge or power failure are repaired at board level prior to any imaging.
All three generations (Gen3, Gen4 and Gen5) of NVMe are workable in any form factor (M.2 sticks in 2280, 2242 or 2230, PCIe add-in cards and enterprise U.2), as long as the NVMe drive can be physically removed and posted in to us. Some drives fail due to a firmware fault: for example, Samsung 970/980/990 drives can drop off the bus after a firmware fault. Additionally, there are firmware bugs in WD Black SN770 and SN850 M.2 sticks that cause sudden capacity loss. Any NVMe device run without a heatsink may experience throttling, overheating and corruption of its mapping. NVMe devices that are soldered directly to the motherboard are the one thing we cannot recover.
Before sending anything, get a quote from us either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic. Then post your hardware to us (tracked and insured), or drop it off at our Guildford laboratory in person.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV/DVR or server? You will need to remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive, as we are unable to remove the drive for you. We also cannot recover storage soldered onto a motherboard, such as in Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops. Only drives that can be removed from a machine and sent to us can be recovered. If you are unsure whether your device has a removable drive, please call us before sending. RAID, server and SAN drives need to be removed from their enclosure and labelled by bay. For a NAS, send the disks themselves if they are removable, otherwise the entire NAS device. An external single drive should come to us whole, along with its cable and power supply.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Please mark the package for the attention of Guildford Data Recovery, and we will call you as soon as we have diagnosed your media.
Unsure as to how to proceed with sending the item in for recovery? Then simply call 0800 689 0668, or complete the free online diagnostic prior to dispatching the item to obtain your price quotation.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start now or call the freephone.