Can Data Be Recovered from a Crashed SSD?

When solid state drives (SSDs) hit the market, they were hailed for their speed and reliability. Many users assume that because an SSD has no moving parts, it is less likely to fail, and this is true when we speak of “mechanical failure”, but like any other electronic component it can fail. We all know that data can be recovered from a crashed hard drive, but what if an SSD crashes? Can we recover its content?

It is true that as a general rule you will never have to worry about the mechanical components of your SSD because it does not have them, and therefore there is no wear of this type. However, memory cells do suffer wear, and as many of you know, the memory chips of SSDs have a maximum number of writes and erasures that they support, so there comes a time when the device is unusable .

Can Data Be Recovered from a Crashed SSD

Can data be recovered from a crashed SSD?

The quick and easy answer is “usually” yes. Yes, the SSD has “died” due to natural causes (the memory cells have reached the end of their useful life), but as you well know there are more reasons why a device can fail, in which case the answer is that it depends , since it is not the same as a failure due to power failure or over voltage, or because it has been dropped to the ground and has been hit, causing physical damage.

Recuperar datos de un SSD destruido

In the latter case, we already tell you to say goodbye to your data, and only specialized companies that charge very high rates will be able to recover your data.

Unlike mechanical hard drives, SSDs do not emit any type of noise, so they will not give us any obvious signs that they are about to fail; they just suddenly stop working. If the problem is that they have reached the end of their useful life, errors will appear in the operating system indicating that the SSD is in “read-only” mode, in which case, as its definition shows, we will be able to access and read that data .

A simple way to recover data from an SSD that has reached the end of its life is to simply clone it to a new drive , although we can also connect it to another PC as a secondary device and access it to extract the data without any problem. Read only means that we cannot write or erase anything else on the SSD, but we can access the data and copy it to another device.

Now, if your SSD has failed for other reasons, as we have mentioned before, the thing will depend on what has been the cause of the failure, and therefore recovering the data may not be possible. For example, if the SSD has been “burned out” due to a power surge (something that is quite rare, let it be said), it will be difficult to recover the data, but there are companies that are dedicated to it that will not have much difficulty in doing so. that can access the data chip by chip. Now, if you open the SSD and see that the memory chips are punctured, then the damage is irreversible and the data has been inaccessible forever.

In short, when an SSD stops working it will always be possible to recover the data as long as it has reached the limit of writes of its memory cells, and in fact it is very easy to do so. Whether the SSD has “died” prematurely for some other reason will depend on the type of damage it has, but if it has physical damage it will be extremely difficult to recover anything.