Solid state drives don't fail like hard drives — there's no warning click, just a drive that's there one day and gone the next. We recover NVMe, M.2, mSATA and 2.5" SATA SSDs from laptops, desktops and external enclosures for customers across Staines and the wider Surrey area.
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 free diagnostic page.
Every ssd job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve 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.
Older Samsung EVO drives crawl on cold data through a firmware bug, then sometimes drop the controller entirely — imaged and refreshed on the bench.
Crucial MX and BX drives can shrink to a tiny capacity or vanish after a power event when the controller loses its mapping.
An SSD scatters your data across NAND memory chips governed by a controller running intricate firmware. When that controller or its firmware fails, the drive can drop off completely even though every byte is still sitting safely in the chips. Getting it back means engaging the drive at a low level — through the manufacturer's service modes, or by reading the NAND directly and rebuilding the controller's translation map in software. It's specialist work, and it's routine for our lab.
Samsung, Crucial, Kingston, SanDisk, WD, Intel and Apple SSDs in every common shape: NVMe and M.2 sticks from current laptops, mSATA from ultrabooks, and 2.5-inch SATA drives — provided the drive can be removed and sent to us. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard. TRIM and encryption complications are part of the day job, and we'll always tell you plainly what's achievable before you commit to anything.
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 and 2.5" drives all covered — as long as the drive can be removed and sent to us — including drives locked read-only by their own firmware. Samsung 840/860/870 EVOs are prone to firmware read-slowdowns and sudden controller death; Crucial and Micron drives can drop to a tiny capacity after a power cut; Kingston budget SSDs often lose their translator; and SanDisk and WD units regularly fail read-only at end of life. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard.
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.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
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.