It worked yesterday. Today the machine does not see it at all — no drive letter, nothing in BIOS, as though it was never fitted. That is how Samsung SSDs fail: without warning and without a sound. There is no clicking to hear and no slowdown to notice. But an SSD that is not detected is very rarely an SSD that has lost your data — the flash is usually intact behind a controller that has stopped answering.
Samsung sold its spinning-disk business to Seagate years ago, which means a “Samsung data recovery” job today is usually one of two very different things: an older Samsung hard drive (SpinPoint, or a Seagate-built drive still wearing the badge) or — far more often now — a Samsung SSD: the 8xx and 9xx EVO and PRO series, the T5 and T7 portables, or the NVMe drive soldered into a laptop.
This is what makes Samsung SSD recovery different, and harder. A dying hard drive gives you notice — it clicks, it slows, it freezes, and you get a window in which to act. A failing SSD gives you nothing. It works perfectly one day, and the next it is simply not detected at all: no drive letter, no BIOS entry, nothing. The controller has failed, or gone into a protective read-only or panic mode, and the flash behind it is unreachable.
The 870 EVO had a well-documented bad batch some years ago; the T5 and T7 portables fail at the controller and the connector. But the pattern is the same across all of them: the NAND chips holding your data are usually fine. What has failed is the controller that translates between them and your computer.
People try recovery software first, and on an undetected SSD it cannot help — not because the software is bad, but because there is nothing for it to scan. Software needs the operating system to see a drive. If the controller is dead, the drive does not present itself at all, and no amount of scanning will conjure it into existence. Worse, on an SSD that is intermittently detected, running software over it can trigger the very garbage collection and TRIM operations that permanently erase what you are trying to recover.
Recovery starts at controller level — putting the drive into a technical mode where the controller can be worked with directly, bypassing the fault that stops it presenting normally. Where that fails, the work goes to chip level: the NAND is read directly with our chip-level equipment, and the raw dump reconstructed around the wear-levelling, interleaving and encryption the controller would normally handle. That reconstruction is the hard part, and it is why SSD recovery is genuine specialist work rather than a software job.
If a Samsung SSD has vanished from the system, stop. Do not keep power-cycling it, do not run scanning tools, and do not let anyone “have a go” with software. The free diagnostic establishes whether the controller can be reached before anything is charged. And if it is an older Samsung hard drive that is clicking, see hard drive recovery — a completely different fault, with a completely different fix.