It worked yesterday. Today the computer cannot find it at all: no drive letter and nothing in the BIOS settings, like it had never been installed. That is how you can expect Samsung SSD failures to occur: completely unannounced, with no noise (unlike a hard disk failure), and no slowdown. However, an SSD that is not recognised by your computer will usually have retained most or all of your files, because the flash memory typically still exists but the controller is now dead and no longer responding.
The old Samsung spinning disk business was sold to Seagate many years ago, so a “Samsung data recovery” job today can be either an old Samsung hard drive (SpinPoint, or a Seagate-made drive with a Samsung name on it) or, much more frequently today, a Samsung SSD: the 8xx and 9xx EVO and PRO series, the T5 and T7 portable SSDs, or an NVMe SSD taken out of a laptop.
This is what sets Samsung SSD recovery apart from others, and why it’s so much more difficult than traditional hard disk recovery. When your hard drive is about to fail, your computer will often give you some sort of warning signs. You hear clicking noises. Your computer will slow down. Sometimes your computer will freeze. And during this time you have an opportunity to take action to recover as much data as possible. However, when an SSD fails, there are no warnings. It just works fine one day, and then the next thing you know your computer cannot find your drive. No drive letters show up. There is no entry for the drive in your BIOS. Nothing shows up. The controller has failed or gone into a protective read-only or panic mode, and the flash behind it can’t be reached.
Several Samsung drives have had serious issues with failure, including the 870 EVO with a widely reported “bad” batch some years ago. Some users have noted failures in the T5 and T7 series due to both the controller and the connector failing. However, it seems as though there is a common theme among these types of devices: even when they do fail, the actual NAND chips which hold your data usually remain intact. It appears to be the controllers that translate between the NAND chips on the drive and your computer which have failed.
People normally try using recovery software first and with an undetected SSD it can’t work, not due to poor quality or design in the software, but since there is nothing for the software to scan. The software depends upon being able to view the drive through the operating system. When the controller dies, the drive will never appear. There is no way that scanning will make the drive appear. In addition, when the SSD is sometimes detected as a drive (i.e., has sometimes been visible), attempting to run recovery software against it may cause the same garbage collection and TRIM processes which destroy your ability to recover data from the SSD.
Recovery starts at the controller level: placing the drive in a technical state where you can work with the controller directly, avoiding the failure that prevents normal presentation of the drive. When working at this level does not succeed, then the next step is to work at the chip level: we read from the NAND using our specialised chip-level reading tools and reconstruct the data on the disk as per how the controller will typically perform wear-levelling, interleave and encrypt the data for presentation. This reconstruction is the difficult part and therefore SSD recovery is true specialist work, and not just a software task.
If your Samsung SSD has vanished from the system, stop. Don’t keep turning the power on/off. Don’t use scanning programs. Let no one else have at it using their own programs. A free diagnostic will tell you first of all whether the controller is reachable before we charge you anything. If, however, it’s an older model Samsung hard drive (clicking), then see hard drive recovery: a completely different type of failure, requiring a completely different repair solution.