Read this before you do anything else
Don't power it on to see if it survived. That test is the risk.
There are no platters or heads in this one, so a drop does not cause the mechanical crash it would on a hard drive, and the honest news is that the odds here are much better. What a drop does damage is the connector, the solder joints holding the memory to the board, or the controller. That matters for what you do next: repeatedly plugging in a device with a cracked joint can shift a marginal connection to a dead one, and a controller that browns out mid-write can corrupt the mapping tables that say where your files physically live. Try it once. If it does not mount, stop there rather than working the connector.
Emergency
Dropped SSD
If your SSD has been dropped, the most useful thing on this page is above this paragraph, and it is free. What follows is what the fault usually turns out to be, how recoverable this class of failure is, and what it would cost, including the cases we would tell you to take elsewhere.
What this usually turns out to be
There is genuinely good news here and it is worth stating plainly: an SSD has no platters, no heads and nothing rotating, so a drop cannot produce the mechanical crash that defines this fault on a hard drive. Solid-state drives are specified for shock levels that would destroy a spinning disk. What can actually break is the circuit board itself, or the solder connecting the memory packages and the controller to it, and a fall onto a hard floor from height is capable of cracking one of those joints. The memory packages themselves survive nearly anything.
No moving parts, so an SSD never clicks or grinds. What fails instead is the controller or the translation layer that maps your files onto the flash beneath them.
Nothing at allbetter news
With no moving parts there is nothing inside to knock out of alignment. A dropped flash device very often survives a fall that would have killed a hard drive outright.
Controller or memory-package damage
The board flexed or the memory package took the impact. Less common than connector damage, and the harder of the two, but the storage itself is often still readable directly.
Cracked solder joint or connector damagebetter news
Common on USB sticks and phones, where the impact is taken by the connector rather than any storage. The memory itself is usually intact.
What to check first on an SSD
- Connect it and see. Unlike a hard drive there is no penalty for trying, because there is nothing in there that can grind against anything.
- If it appears normally, copy anything important off and then carry on using it. A working SSD after a drop is a working SSD.
- If it does not appear, check it in a second machine or enclosure to rule out the port.
What not to do
Do not run a secure erase, a firmware update or a manufacturer reinitialise if it fails to appear. On a drive whose fault is a cracked solder joint, those tools cannot help, and if the drive does respond partway through one of them you will have rewritten the mapping tables that hold the only record of where your data physically sits.
How recoverable this is
Governed almost entirely by one question: was it running when it fell? A parked, powered-off drive dropped a short distance frequently survives with nothing wrong at all. A drive dropped while spinning is the harder case, and it gets harder every time it is powered on afterwards. Flash devices and phones fare much better: with no moving parts, a drop usually damages the connector or the board rather than the storage.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- How many times it has been powered on since
- Whether the damage is confined to the connector or reaches the memory behind it
- Whether the memory packages are still bonded to the board, since a cracked joint is repairable and a cracked die is not
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
from $399
SSD, NVMe and flash
Controller and translation-layer failures. You'll get an honest answer early. TRIM means some SSD losses are unrecoverable by anyone.
What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable. You get one fixed figure after the assessment and it does not move afterwards. If we can’t recover what matters to you, there is no recovery fee.
Other faults on an SSD
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.