Devices · SSD & NVMe drives
An SSD gives you nothing to hear. The machine shuts down as normal, and next time the BIOS lists no drive at all. Three faults cover nearly everything: the controller dies, the firmware corrupts itself, or the power goes while a write is in progress. Of the drives Hull sends us, Western Digital and Crucial badges are commonest. We work at the flash, and early beats late.
An engineer will take the details
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| What you see | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| The drive names itself SATAFIRM S11 | One cause only: a Phison controller has fallen back to its ROM | Leave the vendor's tool alone |
| Nothing at all in the BIOS | Almost always controller or firmware. The flash behind is untouched | It needs chip-level work |
| Reported as 0GB, or a size that is obviously wrong | The FTL — the flash translation layer — has fallen over | Stop rebooting it |
| SMART health falls away overnight | Real cell wear, or a controller talking nonsense | Read the vendor advisory, then image it |
| Reads come back with 0x800701E3 | The fault is in the hardware | Image it. Run no repair software |
| A firmware update, then: Boot device not found | The firmware write stopped half done and nothing will boot | Keep it powered off |
Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.
Every power-on costs a failing drive something. It is brought up instead in a service mode we control, so the flash answers the bench directly and firmware that has stopped coping is kept out of it.
When the controller will not answer, the flash gets read directly and the translation table is rebuilt in software. A raw dump on its own means nothing. Rebuild that table and your folder tree comes back.
Wear levelling puts parts of one document on every die there is. That is the point of it. The pieces are put back in order, the volume rebuilt, and each entry checked against the listing you are sent.
You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.
Worth knowing before you update: a firmware flash overwrites the very area that records where your files sit, and if the power drops half way through, nothing older survives beneath it to fall back on. Almost every update completes without trouble. Take a copy first regardless. A drive that is already playing up should not be updated at all.
The laptop's system SSD stopped in the middle of a firmware update. After that it would not read at all. From technical mode an engineer restored its translator tables. The photographer's catalogues, ten years of edits, opened again.
Possibly. Shut the machine down now rather than tonight. TRIM is the reason: an SSD scrubs the blocks behind a deleted file by itself, on its own schedule, for as long as it stays powered. A hard disk never did that. Here, and almost nowhere else, cutting the power is the right move.
Rarely. A silent drive usually means the controller or its firmware has gone, and the flash behind them is untouched. We read the chips on the bench, and most of what was on there comes back.
Not harder. Different. A hard disk breaks where it moves. An SSD breaks in the controller and in the tables the controller keeps. If TRIM has not already been through, the odds are decent.
Yes, we take those. They sit with the Mac and laptop work. Same job at the flash, except the chips are read in place rather than lifted off.
Leave it switched off. A failing drive has a limited number of starts in it, and each one spends a little more. The free diagnosis will say which files can be read.