Samsung SSD recovery — EVOs, Pros & T-series.

Although the reliability that allows Samsung’s reputation is reported by a chip that gives no prior warning before it quits, the “dead” SSDs we receive rarely show signs of wear: a completely intact 870 EVO or 990 Pro that was detected during the last shutdown but was absent upon startup and missing from the BIOS, without so much as a single error reading recorded. This indicates that these are likely controller or firmware failures, which account for the majority of SSD failure types rather than a failure of the Samsung drive itself. There are two additional footnotes about brands that relate to this. Samsung has provided defective firmware in some of their shipping products (the 840 EVO had slowdown issues accessing old data; the 980 and 990 Pro lost health readings faster than usual) however all were resolved through firmware updates. Firmware updates can be used as preventative maintenance for operating drives, but they cannot save failing ones. The portable T-series has a life span of being subject to damage from being dragged across desktop surfaces and cable runs where sometimes a dead T7 may be due to a broken USB interface rather than dead storage. Regardless of the model used, the most important aspect to know is that in most cases, the controller will stop functioning, while leaving the flash memory (and thus your files) behind untouched.

What is Samsung Magician actually useful for? It has many uses within its own limits, such as being the most easy-to-read of the vendor dashboards: providing wear percentage, total writes against the drive’s TBW rating, temperatures and firmware updates without any technical jargon. Use Magician twice per year on any drive you are counting on; Magician is part of the routine we outline in our SSD health guide. However, do not ask it to predict the failure that kills most of these drives. The number you receive is a wear factor, and while wear is rarely the thing that kills these types of drives, the sudden electronic failure that does kill them will never show up on your wear gauge because the component that shows you the gauge is usually the first to die. Therefore there is only one honest division of labour: Magician for maintenance, a backup for the failure Magician will never be able to tell you about. When a drive begins malfunctioning the desire to ‘fix’ it by flashing firmware, performing a Secure Erase or running a lengthy self test is nothing but a wish to worsen things. Identify what it was doing before shutting off the power and have some diagnostics look at it.

When the actual drive itself fails, depending upon how much farther down the controller has progressed in its failure, one of two different recovery paths will be taken. If the controller is able to communicate at an administrative (maintenance) level, then we have the ability to drop the controller into that administrative state using specialised tools and rebuild the table of translations that tie your files to where they are physically stored in flash. If the controller is unable to respond at an administrative level, then we need to go further. We must remove the NAND package(s), and from that point forward reconstruct the interleaved storage structure that Samsung’s own wear-levelling algorithms broke up your data into, a time-consuming task especially when dealing with such highly integrated chips as those used in many of these models. It should also be noted that one other item may possibly present an issue before you consider recovering your drive. Some Samsung models use a type of hardware encryption that can limit the chip-off route. Therefore, it is largely for that reason that each job starts with a complimentary 48-hour diagnostic period followed by a written quote rather than a flat fee. A detailed explanation of all possible methods of recovery can be found on the SSD & NVMe page. Also, please note that if your problem is simply a lost or deleted file rather than a dead drive, then TRIM does indeed change things. This is explained in detail in the failed-SSD guide.