Data Recovery Case File · SSD / NVMe · An Honest Limit

The case we didn't take: a Samsung 970 EVO Plus, a faulty translator, and what no lab should promise

Most case files here end with data going home. This one ends with the truth going home instead, and it's published on purpose. The customer's NVMe drive had failed after a power cut; a competent lab elsewhere had diagnosed it accurately and — creditably — admitted the limits of what its tools could reach. He came to us hoping we'd say something different. Here is exactly what we said.

The enquiry

“After a power cut my SSD seems to be empty. I sent it to a recovery lab, and they said it has a faulty translator firmware module — the controller can't read it, which is why the drive reports itself as empty — and that until there's support for these Samsung controllers at a lower firmware level, they can't repair it. I was wondering if this is something you could help with?”

What we verified — free, as any honest answer should be

First, the other lab deserved its due: their diagnosis was right. The translator is the firmware structure that maps the tidy drive the computer expects onto the scattered physical reality of the flash — and a power cut striking mid-housekeeping is precisely how it gets corrupted. A drive with a broken translator hasn't lost your data; it has lost the index to your data, and reports itself empty because, as far as it can tell, it is. On a hard drive, or on many SSDs built on widely-used controllers, that's a known and often winnable fight: laboratory tools can enter such drives at a technological level beneath the firmware and rebuild what broke. Our assessment confirmed the fault and confirmed the wall behind it: Samsung's in-house NVMe controllers are a closed world — no public technological mode, no third-party firmware toolset, and hardware encryption baked in, which forecloses the last resort too, since reading the NAND chips directly yields ciphertext only the dead controller's machinery could interpret.

What we told him — and won't dress up

That this is, today, a genuine industry-wide limit, not a shortfall of effort or a haggling position; that anyone quoting confidently to "repair the firmware" on this controller family should be asked precisely how, and that a vague answer to that question is itself an answer; and that the honest options are few but real. The drive costs nothing to have assessed and nothing to be told the truth about — no fix, no fee, meant literally. The data is not destroyed, merely sealed: kept safe and unpowered, the drive loses nothing by waiting, and the tooling landscape does evolve — no promises attached, because promises about other people's future breakthroughs aren't ours to make. And where the stakes justify it, the manufacturer's own engineering channels are the one party holding keys to its own castle. He left with his drive, a written assessment, and no invoice.

Why this page exists

Because the measure of a recovery lab isn't the cases where everything works — it's what happens when something can't. A company that will look you in the eye over an unrecoverable drive is a company whose "yes" means something on every other page of these files. And because the failure itself carries the most useful warning in this whole archive: SSDs fail logically, suddenly, and absolutely — no clicking overture, no warning weeks, one power cut between "fine" and "empty". The 970 EVO Plus is a superb drive. It is not a backup strategy. Nothing is, except the second copy.

Our case files are drawn from genuine enquiries received by our laboratory over the past ten years, anonymised to protect client confidentiality. Each one describes the diagnostic and recovery procedure our engineers apply to that fault, using the equipment listed.