THE STATE OF SOLID STATE RECOVERY

If you’ve checked our blog out (which you should be doing!), than you’d notice we’ve talked fairly extensively about the function of the HDD and how it pertains to data recovery. What some may be yearning for is information about solid state drives. Solid State Drives are new, state of the art devices that rely on flash memory chips instead of the traditional platter to platter head reading process.

This allows a lightning fast data retrieval process and better hard drive function in general. The Chips that make up a SSD can be permanently bonded to a motherboard, but they typically come in a sleek, **solid** block full of flash memory holding chips.

It may be tempting to think that because solid state drives are newer technology that they may retain data better, but that’s not really the case. In fact, the revolutionary nature of the SSD works against the effectiveness of data recovery. Flash memory on an SSD is just that, a flash.

If you delete something “permanently” from a HDD, the sector containing the data will not be instantly repurposed. If you delete it from a Solid State Drive, say sayonara! That memory is as good as gone. Think of storage memory on an SSD much like memory in the Men in Black film trilogy. Once it’s neuralyzed, it’s gone.

This process allows for a more efficient, compact hard drive, but it hurts the ability of data recovery experts to recover the most data possible. With HDDs, there are many programs and machines that cull through the sectors and retrieve an abundance of previously deleted data, but with SSDs, the amount of data to be recovered is limited to what’s immediately available on the flash drives.

If your SSD loses function, it’s a race against time. Whereas HDDs can use DSAT or cleanroom machinery, SSD recovery from broken drives takes place with a NAND chip reader. SSD chips are a bit harder to read than HDDs, as the function isn’t as cut and dry as a platter head and spinning platters. Inside every chip are thousands of blocks of data to be read. NAND readers analyze the blocks within the flash chips and configure a data image to be replicated.

SSDs and HDDs have differences in internal configuration between HDD and SDD that lend to slightly different means of recovery. The functionality of the SSD mean that deleted files can’t be retrieved, but the internal chips are much sturdier than the platters that constantly run themselves to death.