A Sony Vaio arrived carrying an M.2 SSD that no BIOS and no external adapter would acknowledge — and carrying, too, a diagnosis from a local computer repair shop who’d told the customer honestly that this was beyond them: NAND chip removal and reading territory. Important personal and business files inside; the referral was the right call.
Bench analysis agreed with the shop: the SSD’s controller had failed while the NAND memory itself tested intact — healthy data behind a dead gatekeeper, with no physical damage in sight. The route was chip-off: the NAND packages were removed from the board by micro-soldering, cleaned and prepared, then read directly on chip-level tooling. Raw NAND is deliberately scrambled — wear-levelling, interleaving and ECC spread every file across the chips in controller-specific patterns — so the extraction was followed by the real work: algorithmic reconstruction of the original data layout, reassembling the file structure the dead controller used to maintain, then verifying it file by file.
99% of the customer’s data was recovered and handed back on a new external SSD — personal and business files both, from a drive two ordinary tools couldn’t even see. Credit where due: the repair shop’s honest referral protected this outcome. Chip-off is precisely the specialist tier this lab’s memory-chip heritage was built for, and ‘the shop says it’s dead’ is where that tier begins, not where hope ends.
When a shop says only chip reading can save an SSD, they’re describing this bench’s home ground. The SSD page covers the routes beneath the operating system. The first step never changes: a free diagnostic and a fixed written quote before anything is at stake — or call 0131 202 0491 and describe what happened.