Recover what files I can on a failed Intel SSD

In June I left my Micro Center Model B728 operating with Windows 10 Pro 64-bit on for a few days and tha seemed to never cause a problem. I was surprised one morning to have a BSOD on the desktop machine and nothing I did could get the OS up and runnung. I took in in to Micro Center for evalution and repair. The technician told me he could not repair it and recommended a new SSD. The failed on was an Intel SSD540s.

On the same PC I had installed a Western Digital HDD to store data and photos and all data and photos were there. Using my laptop I took the HDD and plugged it into a StarTech.com 3.5 in SATA HDD Docking Station and waited until the PC was repaired, using a new SSD (Samnsung) and reinstalling the OS I am back in business. They offered to try to recorver the data from the SSD that crashed but the price seemed excessive, But I told them to save the drive for me.

I connected the Solid State Drive, the Intel SSD540a Series using the StarTech Dock, but the OS prompts me saying the drive needs to be formatted.

I'm reluctant to do that because ut seems I will lose everything on the ESSD

Would someone advise me on a procedure (hardware & software) which would let me recover some of the files? I realize many files may be gone for good but I'd like to try this.

Mark

Hi Mark,

I am not the biggest expert on SSDs, but if the controller has failed, which is probably the case here, you might not be able to get your data back at all. There is a way, and that is to replace the controller, but that is a feat not available to mere mortals like you and me due to the complexity of the electronics.

Is the drive still under warranty from Intel? Perhaps a trip there might be able to rescue your data. Beyond that, I think you really have to prepare yourself for the possibility that the data on that drive might never be recovered.

I hope you had a backup.

@jumanji might be able to suggest something.

Today’s SSDs self-destroy court evidence through the process that can be called “self corrosion”. Garbage collection running as a background process in most modern SSDs will permanently erase data marked for deletion, making it gone forever in a matter of minutes after the data has been marked for deletion. It is not possible to prevent garbage collection by moving the disk to another PC or attaching it to a write blocking device. The only way to prevent self-corrosion is physically detaching the disk controller from flash memory chips storing the data, and then accessing the chips directly via custom hardware.

How do you know how long it will be till garbage collection gets round to dealing with everything you have deleted ?

That is why the trim optimise is useful.

Just subscribing to this thread.

SIW2 said:

How do you know how long it will be till garbage collection gets round to dealing with everything you have deleted ?

That is why the trim optimise is useful.

The TRIM command enables an operating system to notify the SSD of pages which no longer contain valid data. For a file deletion operation, the operating system will mark the file's sectors as free for new data, then send a TRIM command to the SSD. After trimming, the SSD will not preserve any contents of the block when writing new data to a page of flash memory.

That wasn't the question.

If a file is deleted now, when will it be erased?

SIW2 said:

That wasn't the question.

If a file is deleted now, when will it be erased?

When SSD idle.

So are you saying TRIM not used by Windows and SSD controller if we don't make it use it.