Two days ago, my SSD stopped showing up on my computer (it doesn’t show up in file explorer, disk mgt., device mgt., bios). There was little warning of drive failure; i was downloading a new game to it that morning (had to restart a failed download twice, but the third time succeeded). It’s been humming along without issue for a couple of years now. There are some personal projects, photos, maybe game saves i’d like to retrieve if possible. Any ideas or tips would be helpful?

So far i’ve tried:

  • restarting
  • scanning with device mgr, disk mgr, in the bios
  • power cycling the drive with the sata unplugged
  • switching the sata cable to another port (no show)
  • switching out the drive for a blank drive(no show as well)

next steps are to try cloning the drive with a 2 bay docking station

spec info:

  • drive: 1 TB western digital SA510, working as the secondary drive.
  • OS: Windows 10
  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Yeah, sorry, it sounds like something in the interface or read/write control on the SSD has died. It could be something as simple as a capacitor, or it could be a controller chip. The data is probably still present in the actual storage, but I’m not sure how you would get to it without doing a lot of testing and then desoldering/resoldering components.

    I do know a potentially better place to ask for advice if you want to dig into it more - the forum at grc.com:

    https://forums.grc.com/

    Steve Gibson produces SpinRite, which is a hard drive test & repair application (probably the best out there) and there’s a lot of drive-related discussion on the forum and several other members with expertise. Someone there might have a better idea of what kind of recovery options are possible.