TIL from a data recovery webinar that 40% of SSD failures are due to controller issues, not the NAND flash itself.

I found this out during a free online training session from a data recovery lab in Austin last month, and it's made me much more careful about diagnosing drive issues before declaring the data totally gone.

3 comments

3 Comments

grantnelson2d agoMost Upvoted

Yeah, I had a drive that wouldn't show up at all. Swapped the controller board from a donor drive and it came right back to life. Saved a ton of client data that way.

henryr452d ago

Honestly, have you ever tried that with newer drives though? I messed with a recent NVMe that died and swapping boards did nothing. The controller is often paired to the flash chips now. Sometimes you even need to move the chips themselves to a special reader, which is way past a simple swap. Feels like the easy fix days are fading.

faithpatel2d ago

I read a tech blog that said the controller is basically the drive's brain, so when it fails the data is often still sitting there on the flash chips. That webinar number makes total sense now. It's why those recovery places can sometimes just fix the board and get everything back. Makes you realize how important it is to get a proper diagnosis before giving up on a dead SSD.