Data Recovery from Solid State Drives

Solid state drive technology is moving into more and more arenas, and with good reason. SSD is increasingly used in mobile devices and often replaces traditional hard disk drives in high-quality laptops, netbooks and desktop computers. While SSDs offer many advantages for data storage, they also offer exceptional challenges for data recovery, according to data recovery professionals. The traditional methods of data recovery don’t work with solid state drives, which rely on a completely different method of storing data than do hard disk drives.

Solid State Drives vs. Hard Disk Drives

SSDs were originally developed for military use, and later adapted for use in MP3 players, USB drives and memory cards, including those commonly used in camcorders, digital cameras and phones. They differ drastically from hard drive disks, which store data on magnetically charged disks. SSDs instead use a solid-state semiconductor, such as a memory chip or other electrically erasable RAM devices. Because they don’t use moving parts nor require synchronization among moving parts, SSDs boot up more quickly, access files more quickly, launch applications more quickly and move data more quickly, and do so while using less energy. This means faster operation and longer battery life.

Data Loss and Data Recovery on Hard Drives

Hard drives are more susceptible to data loss as a natural consequence of mechanical wear, among other things. There are two types of hard drive failures that lead to a need for data recovery – logical failures, such as accidentally deleted files, corrupted data, software errors and corrupted data; and mechanical failures that happen because of physical damage to the drive – scratched disks, for example. While it’s easier to lose data from a hard drive, data recovery is also generally relatively easy. Even in cases of actual physical failure, which requires the work of a data recovery professional, most of the data can often be recovered.

SSD Data Recovery – Less Often Necessary but Harder to Do

Since SSDs don’t have any moving parts, they’re far less likely to suffer from mechanical failure than hard drives, and thus far less likely to suffer data loss. When it does happen, however, it’s usually because of electrical damage, firmware corruption or controller failure. Of course, you can still accidentally delete files or get a virus that corrupts your files. Unfortunately, the very things that make SSDs more efficient and faster also make data recovery harder. Unlike hard drives, which can overwrite data, SSDs must erase data before writing new data to a section on the drive. In order to maximize performance, many SSDs periodically “clean up” the drive by erasing orphaned blocks of data, making it far less likely that data recovery professionals can find and recover the data that was originally written to them.

Data recovery experts use proprietary methods to recover as much data as possible even from solid state drives, and many have remarkable success at doing so. If you’ve lost data from a device that stores it on an SSD and think it’s irretrievably gone, check with a data recovery expert such as Fields Data Recovery, before giving up on it. There have been surprising strides in data recovery technology that allow professionals to retrieve data from many SSDs.