Seven years of an architectural practice's CAD work on a single M.2 stick that had been running too hot for months — and then produced a burning smell and stopped existing.
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An architectural firm's workstation drive. It had been running excessively hot even under ordinary load — the warning nobody heeds, because a hot drive is not an obviously broken one. Then there was a burning smell, and the SSD stopped being detected by the BIOS entirely. Not a corrupted drive. No drive. The slot read as empty.
On it: seven years of architectural drawings, CAD files and project data, with no backup. CAD is unusually unforgiving to lose, because there is no partial version of a 3D assembly. It is complete or it is scrap.
NVMe drives push a great deal of throughput through a very small package, and in a workstation with no heatsink over the M.2 slot the heat has nowhere to go. Sustained thermal stress degrades the controller die and the solder beneath it.
around the power delivery components.
This is the important finding and it is the usual one: the flash chips survive, and they are completely unreadable, because the controller held the map of where every block physically lives.
The NAND was read, the translation layer rebuilt, and the drawings came back — blueprints, 3D models, project files and the historical design archive — on a new drive.
On a burnt controller with intact NAND, that is the expected outcome rather than a lucky one. What makes flash recovery genuinely unpredictable is not the severity of the damage — it is the controller family. Some are thoroughly understood and their translation layers reconstruct cleanly. Some are not, and some recent drives integrate the controller and NAND so tightly that there is nothing to lift. That is established at the free diagnosis, not guessed at over the phone.
Thermal throttling is the warning, and it is the only one you get. An SSD that has started running hot and slow is telling you, in the only language it has, that it is under stress. It does not click. It does not grind. It does not degrade gracefully. It works, and then it does not exist.
If a machine has been getting hot and stuttering under load, back it up today, not at the weekend. And if an M.2 drive is sitting in a workstation or a thin laptop with no heatsink over it, fit one — they cost a few pounds.
Drop the drive at our Quayside reception, or post it to us — it costs nothing to find out what happened. You get a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.