Samsung 860 Evo 2.5" SSD suddenly died. Can I retrieve the data from it?

This was the OS drive in my old PC. I recently built a new PC, and have been slowly organizing files and moving them to my new drives in my new PC. Unfortunately, I hadn't yet transferred everything over, and there's a bunch of stuff on this old OS drive that's kind of important to me.

This drive stopped working upon waking my old PC out of sleep mode. The PC woke up, but there was no picture. When I hard reset the PC, it didn't load into the OS, there was just a flickering cursor in the top-left of the screen. I've tried reading the drive from my new PC, and it isn't detected at all. When I set a SATA port to be hot-swappable, I'm able to connect another Samsung 860 Evo SSD I have, and it detects fine when plugged in: Windows makes a sound to denote a drive has been connected, and I can access the drive and its files in File Explorer. But when I do the same with the old OS drive, there's no sound, and no drive is added to File Explorer.

What are my options?

Make a Linux-based boot drive with a USB stick or memory card and see what Linux sees, sometimes it performs better than Windows in that regard.

That's all I can think of short of sending it off to a forensics company.

I've called a few places, and have been surprised at how expensive it is to do data retrieval. Looking at over $500 USD minimum, up to over $1500.

Thankfully, I have redundant backups of almost all my data. But there is still a bunch of stuff on this drive that I hadn't yet sorted and backed up, which has some importance to me. I might hold onto it and hope that prices to retrieve data come down in the future.

The drive is still under warranty for another few months. I'm going to check with Samsung if I'm able to get a replacement and keep the drive, so that I can do data-recovery with it later.

Delicieuxz said:

I've called a few places, and have been surprised at how expensive it is to do data retrieval. Looking at over $500 USD minimum, up to over $1500.

Thankfully, I have redundant backups of almost all my data. But there is still a bunch of stuff on this drive that I hadn't yet sorted and backed up, which has some importance to me. I might hold onto it and hope that prices to retrieve data come down in the future.

The drive is still under warranty for another few months. I'm going to check with Samsung if I'm able to get a replacement and keep the drive, so that I can do data-recovery with it later.

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Prices will never go down on data recovery. It is basically blackmail. If the data is so important to you pay up. Being a SSD the data is going to degrade faster then a typical HDD so holding on to it will probably make it harder and more expensive to recover.

Your only remaining alternative is to try a different OS to see whether that one likes the SSD any better.

Most likely its part of the power section that has a short or a fail. The flash is probably fine. If you know how to use a multi-meter and a heat gun it could be a cheap fix.

The daring thing would be buy the exact same drive and transfer the flash chips over to that drive. But thats why it costs $500+...

Data recovery is an extremely manual process; you have to basically disassemble the drive and try to pull working pieces out of it, while guessing at what is working and what isn't. I'm a little surprised that you got a quote as low as $500. Don't expect anything significantly better.

Transfering the flash chips from one drive to another looks straight-forward, and shouldn't take more than a half-hour. And I have another 1TB 860 Evo that I could use as a donor drive.

There's a mobile phone repair shop here that charges by the hour. I wonder if they'd be able to transfer the flash chips for relatively cheap. I'm good with soldering, and I could also attempt it, myself. I'd just be concerned with how easy it is to ensure the chips line up perfectly with the solder pads underneath.




At 1:56 in this video, the person gives a method to help align Samsung Evo drive chips.

A new complication in things is that Samsung refuse to honour the warranty for the dead SSD unless I have the invoice for the original purchase. I purchased it 5 years ago and don't recall where from, or whether I purchased it online or in person. I wouldn't have kept a physical receipt of it, and I don't have a digital record of it from the online stores I've checked. Pretty lame warranty, to condition it on people keeping a receipt for many years.

A few years ago I would RMA SSDs (even 60GB ones) but now when I can get a 1TB for £33...I wouldnt bother.

How prices are dropping they will be giving them away soon.

daglesj said:

A few years ago I would RMA SSDs (even 60GB ones) but now when I can get a 1TB for £33...I wouldnt bother.

How prices are dropping they will be giving them away soon.

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I know.