can x-ray help us recover data from NVMe SSD
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- čas přidán 28. 03. 2023
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We received this NVMe SSD for data recovery a couple of weeks ago. The client had already taken it to another data recovery shop for M.2 SSD data recovery PCIe, but they were unable to restore the data. Strangely enough, the same night that we received the request from the client, I experienced an SSD failure of my own. Upon opening up my Lenovo ThinkPad, I discovered that I was using a WD Black SN850 with a capacity of 2 terabytes, whereas the client's SSD was a 1 TB unit with a slightly different design.
Fortunately, I was able to produce an image of my failed SSD using PC3000 Portable 3. However, when the client's NVMe SSD arrived, it was not showing up and PC3000 would get stuck in a busy state while trying to initialize the SSD. After examining the components and circuitry, I did not notice anything abnormal, and there were no signs of soldering attempts. However, there was a small cut in the board close to the interface that caught my attention. Upon closer examination, I suspected that there might be a fracture that occurred on the inner layers.
The cost of SSD data recovery can vary depending on the complexity of the issue. In this case, we had to use a local x-ray to produce images and diagnose the problem. Unfortunately, solid-state drives like this one do not have open-source schematics that would explain the responsibility of each trace. Our best course of action was to find a broken wire and link it to recreate the connection.
After extensive grinding and cutting of the printed circuit board, we finally reached the layer that contained multiple tiny traces that could potentially be broken. Using a multimeter, I was able to confirm that all but one trace were linked to the circuit. However, the NVMe SSD was still not recognized. In the following video, you can see our attempt at repairing this SN850 SSD and restoring the data for our client.
if you want to ship your failed device to us for data recovery and free evaluation, simply fill out this form: www.hddrecovery.ca/contact-us/
and send your drive boxed with bubble wrap to this address:
HDD Recovery Services
391 Bank St, Suite 201
Ottawa, ON
K2P 1Y3
Canada
Updated 2020 my gear for soldering:
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this video: • can x-ray help us reco... - Věda a technologie
i was on the edge of my seat - then failure! “my conscience is clear” says volumes about you and your business and the lengths you went to get the final news. nail biting stuff dude.
Whoa, that is next level! How about getting the same board as the donor and transplant all original components? Seems hardly more difficult than what you attempted here. Good luck!
yeah...looks doable. With the skills he has.
He needs to transplant 2 to 5 of the big chips, if im right.
Same thoughts here . Seems to me the obvious thing to do. I once did such a thing with a USB drive, though admittedly far easier as it was a long time ago when components weren't so tiny. For the time though it was a huge capacity at 128 mega bytes.
This is like open heart surgery for SSDs
I'm so glad someone like you doing those videos
Very interesting to know more about these recovery procceses and how those types of data storage tools work
Also that is some ant work , each year it becomes more and more complicated with new tech to fix anything
Awsome video! amazing work as always. Thank you for sharing
Good video, thank you. Keep up the great work!
Where can I purchase the grinding pen used? And what brand is it by the way?
Wow you went the extra mile or two on this case, I was so hopefull for you.. such a shame. I guess ace labs have their work cut out catching up with the new devices appearing everyday
me too dude, me too. now I know that at least it is better to start cutting from the other side
@@hddrecoveryservices isn't a chip swap an option? Or are donors rare and expensive?
My suggestion is the hard way. Buy a new donor and move every single component to the new one and try to back up everything then with P3000
we may have a part 2 in April :)
thank you for your videos i learn alot from them
Thanks Raymond
A little late to the party, but did you try and see if it was recognized in Data Extractor? The PC3000 does not yet support that drive (according to them) since it is based on the SanDisk chipset.
Yeah, shame you did not had luck with this one, but it's still nice to see the work done behind it.
edit: The "having them take a charge from time to time" issue is actually thing i was curious about in the past but was told to "don't worry about it " (which did not sit well with me, but i trusted the advice). It's nice to see my gut feeling was not wrong...
I would not worry about it if memory is SLC, but now all SSCs are based on TLC, QLC and 3D NAND crap. I may go into a full video explaining it in detail.
Since the suspicion was a probable bending damage and it was near a bga chip - wouldn't reballing be also worth a try ?
someone mentioned it before. It was worth a try, but I did not have that part filmed. I do get access to ROM mode before and after the reball. We will wait for a donor. Part 2 in April
I had sata SSD with brand midas force, ust before I brought to local professional data recovery, when I pluged in the drive on regular pc windows read removable drive, when I tried to use recovery software I only can retrieve one partition, is it possible to extract data from other partition ?
Will NAND really degrade if not powered on regularly? This is more or less the first I'm hearing of it. Not that I doubt it, I'd just like to know more
It's possible, the voltage slowly gets lower of the cell. This is called cell drift, mostly ECC can correct for this. When the drive is powered there is an algorithm in the drive firmware that refreshes the cell every x amount of time. SLC is the least likely to get affected by it and QLC the most.
Still it's hard to say how much time it takes, it depends on the write cycles and the quality of the NAND.
Like SLC has a retention time of up to 10 years, MLC and TLC are in the 3-5 years range.
But with bad quality NAND or tons of write cycles it can be as short as just 1 year.
@@f0x4nn3 I compare this to Bit Rot on spinning drives, the bits would slowly loose magnetic charge on the platter. The only way to restore the charge is to read and re-write back to restore the data integrity.
Keep up this type of content
Erkin my friend one more magical and informative video. Your beard look cool :))
I'm wondering if the device the drive was in was run over by something. That bend really doesn't make sense. Could you try the donor method?
Finally weekend and I have time to watch this material (by the way THX for X-ray) :D
Since the PCB is damaged, can't you move all the ICs to other/new ones and recover the data in this way?
Client wanted to try the repair first before buying a donor, but the swap is something in plans for mid April. Parts seller didn't want to ship to Canada, so we had to D tour about it
What type of wire are you using? And what is the liquid mask stuff you used?
46AWG isolated wire, curing mask to protect the repair joints. common stuff along cell phone repairs. I get it from union repair (you need ultraviolet curing light for it to turn hard)
Erkin. We have had so many SN850 drives fail in the past year. Well over 50% failure rate. They are all in warranty, and we RMA all of them. But would love to know why they are failing recently. As the past SN750 and SN850 pre-pandemic was rock solid. I originally thought it was chip shortage issues. But had a hunch it also might be the new NUC11. Maybe the NUC is stressing the SN850’s and cracking the internal traces. We are now stress testing the SN850x models. Hopefully they will last longer. Thank you as always for your insight!!!
I gotta RMA mine. Do they send a new or refurbished unit?
@@hddrecoveryservices Brand new. Recently they've been replacing my SN850 with the newer SN850X.
All of our issues have been... The drive doesn't even show up in post or the system bios. It says if the drive is not even installed. Completely dead. We replace with a new SN850 and all is good. I get at least one a week like that.
Downloading the WD dashboard, and updating the firmware, does not help either. They still brick and become unresponsive. Some in a week. But most typically fail within a 6-month time frame or less. The new RMA drives have yet to fail. Which makes me believe it was a chip shortage issue. They used inferior parts just to get product out the door. All the conspiracy theory by me of course. 😜 Again, the history prior to the pandemic these drives were freaking rock solid reliable!
How long did you have yours?
I would have tried reballing or remelting the san disk bga first, probably cracked ball from bend
Thank you for sharing your great work. I don't understand why you said that flash memory devices needs to be powered evey few weeks. After all the data is FLASHED into the memory and doesn't need power to maintain the flashed contents.....
the charge drains overtime :) if you charge your phone fully, and turn it off, put it away for few months what will happen to that charge? will it stay at the same level? no
I've seen some enterprise SSDs that put massive capacitors to keep the charge for longer specifically for that. Look at this article: passive-components.eu/tantalum-polymer-capacitors-protect-data-at-ssd-applications/
@@hddrecoveryservices Thank you so much for the reply and info. I thought that the data is permanently flashed into the chip (like pc bios flash), But now I understand that it still need some current to keep it from being wiped over time.
Still a very interesting video 👍
I feel like M.2 is too fragile of a form-factor for anything but laptops. Too bad U.2 always remained niché and because of that pretty expensive.
maybe this will help. maybe it wont, but if you go back to pointn 9:10 in the video it looks like its possibly bridged 2 data lines while soldering.
I checked them, they were OK. thanks for spotting it
Great 👍
Nice video! I have one doubt can't we recover data by interchanging the chips to a donor board which has good connection?
that would depend on what was the initial issue. if the unit was acting same way when it originally failed (possibly before the fracture even), then no.
I don't have experience with data recovery, but why you didn't just move black parts of SandDisk to a new NVMe SSD?
Parts would take at least 3 weeks to get by the time we got this case. I don't have all the donors that are our there. I have a lot, but this variation that I had was different
I did an x-ray of my chest. My eyes remained open during the x-ray. Is there damage to the eyes.... and should we close our eyes during the x-ray?
great video as always but audio is really bad.
I was so pissed off at myself dude, I plugged the mic to the charger and forgot about it. Charger dumped so much noise into the feed. I cleaned it with some sound effects but I know exactly what you mean
@@hddrecoveryservices despite audio it was still a good and informative video nonetheless. A shame it didn't fix the issue! I wonder if chip-off recovery would have worked to read straight from the NAND?
This was very interesting :)
I have maxsun ssd 512 gb *6 i used it as a external hard drive it suddenly not showing up data but showing in disk management as a disk 1 un located and space shows 1 mb plz help me to find us important data plz
its crazy that there are still people not making backups
I always wondered that, for data that people will pay hundreds if not thousands to recover, why they wouldn't pay for some cheap remote storage and periodically (or automatically) upload to. There's things like Restic/Borg that people can use to compress and encrypt their backups (if they don't trust their cloud provider to not snoop on them for example) and ways to have it automated on every major operating system. It's the sort of insurance that's 100% worth it, even if you never end up needing to use it. For whatever is taught in IT in schools these days, I think backups are still not taught properly enough. It's been a while since I've been in school, maybe it's better since then...
is it possible to transfer the chip to an other board ?
Client actually asked about it after watching this video and bought a donor. Part 2 later in April sometime
But why cant components be transplanted to donor-board?
Maybe they can be, but if the initial issue happened before the PBC got cracked, then swapping chips is not gonna do anything to resolve the case
the advice at the end is interesting. I just watched a video where this guy fixed an old matrox video card. The only thing wrong with it was a corrupted vbios. It's a known common fault. Just simply reflash the bios (which means you're going to need another video card) and you're good to go. Apparently even in the day (late 90's) it was a common issue so they added something to the drivers to periodically flash the bios. LMAO
Oh, wow. Interesting piece of information.
@@H53. I thought it was as well.
SSD is the hardest to be recovered, the easy method is finding thevdonor, but didnt always works and cost more.
Are you self taught or where did you learn this skill?
I have the same drive but mine are scratched on almost all the pins. Is it still repairable? What can I do to revive it?
Keep up the good work :)
Throw it in the TRASH! You realise its not worth fixing? The point of this video is data recovery only and even if it works, will NEVER be put in service again!
We never fix drives in order to return them to service. It's always data focused only.
Can you help me figure out my SD card?? From tx
wow.
Hey bro why you don't make board swap, i know it's will take time you do it.
we did not have a donor for it, and client wanted to try and patch it first
Oh mien gott your hair!
you have bend pcb, close to controller's solder balls and you didn't do a reflow or reballing?
in the later tests I did, the behavior is still the same. Maybe there will be a sequel to this with NAND and Controller swap. I get access to the ROM mode so the controller loads, NANDs get proper power to them, but if I access NAND it just hangs.
@@hddrecoveryservices I wonder did you call to client and ask how much precious the data is? - if he can cover additional cost of buying new or used drive(exactly the same model) to move controller and nand to that board and if this would fix the issue the client could have a data recovered and working drive as well.
извини что опять на русском. инструмент для такой работы отличный, но насадка слишком грубая. для такой операции лучше силиконовую насадку шлифовальную. они разного цвета - соответсвенно разной гридности.
its pr1de month its ok not to be straight LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLL
In all honesty... you destroyed that SSD.
Ok smart ass. How?
@@hddrecoveryservices broo 😂, also awesome skills you have there m8.
he was against u filming stuff coz u can get the same knock off digitial GE xray tools off alibaba for like $2000 and he probably charges enough that he could easily be undercut and still be profitable if the information was just out there floating on youtube for someone to copy or say... sitting in a random youtube comment
Nah, his machine is massive 🤣 I bet it was bought in early 2000s. Anything like that back then would cost a fortune.
mic noise is so bad >.
yep. completely on me, left the charger cable plugged in and did not check my levels before recording. RAW sound before filters would make ears bleed
It would be quicker and cheaper to transplant the controller and memory onto a working drive... wasted too much time and resources on that one.
You are the expert, so you must know. 🤣
@@hddrecoveryservices Depending on how you value your time, wasting time and money driving around for an X-ray while you've been long done reballing the chips with a donor board prepped by then... unless this was purely for CZcams entertainment value this move made no sense.
Ive considered all the options prior to making it happen. Swap would be the last option. I am more concerned about the fact that it responds well to safe mode and gets proper voltage to NANDs. I dont use "let's throw parts at it" approach like most ppl do in this line of work. Sometimes you do things that lead nowhere but it's not wasted time, it's learning, and experience. A that shit my friend is fucking priceless.
@@hddrecoveryservices That's a fair statement then. Always good to learn something new about the inner workings, gives more confidence when approaching similar jobs next time.