A typical laptop yesterday. A "no bootable device" message, a BIOS listing each port except yours, and a missing drive today. We have categorised undetected SSDs into their own service category because the causes for this issue vary from a loose connector to an SSD controller dying overnight. Additionally, each DIY hour that you spend trying different ways to resolve the issue is most likely going to be unproductive, as you will probably try and address the incorrect cause.
Before you assume the worst: re-seat the M.2 blade or SATA cable once, in case it has "walked" loose after a move or an accidental hit. Try one other port or computer once, and then check the BIOS instead of Windows: a device that shows up in the BIOS but does not show up in Windows is a software issue that can be addressed by much gentler means. This is all you need to do. Anything else is off the list. Do not update your firmware if the drive is malfunctioning. Do not use low-level repair utilities. Do not have marathons of trying to get a missing drive back online. If a drive is not showing due to hardware issues, multiple tries will accomplish nothing. If a drive keeps coming in and going out, the time frame when you are able to create a complete and accurate image is being diminished each time you turn it on and off.
In approximate order of arrival: firmware panic locks, where the SSD has encountered internal corruption and will "hide" from you rather than potentially lose your data, sometimes appearing to have no capacity or an incorrect label (this can be resolved with service mode access, and your data typically comes back complete); controller failure, where the drive's brain is dead, so recovery reads the NAND directly; power-side failures on the drive's printed circuit board; and connectors that fail on drives that travel. The free diagnostics process can identify which of these it is within a day or two of receiving the SSD: much less expensive than trying to guess what went wrong, in both money and lost data.
Comparatively good: the hardware is working well enough to communicate back and forth for diagnosis. The problem lies elsewhere, within your PC’s partitioning, filesystems or driver components, which is the recoverable end of this spectrum. Do not initialise or format when prompted: it is simply Windows telling you it cannot read some portion of your files, but is willing to wipe those portions. Our diagnostic will be able to read the parts of the drive that Windows has been unable to read.
No. The fact that there is intermittent detection indicates that one of your components is starting to fail, and each time it appears may be one of the last. If you can see it now, copy the irreplaceable items immediately, the most precious ones first. If it has gone again, stop cycling the power on the computer. Get a quote via phone or using our request-for-quote form, and bring it in (no appointment necessary, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm) while a clean image is still likely.
Manufacturer firmware updates can, and for this reason manufacturer firmware updates are "do not attempt" when you have a drive containing un-backed-up data. Firmware recovery at the bench level, however, is totally different: accessing the drive in a 'service mode' where only the drive's internal system is repaired enough to pull your data out, and the drive is not repaired so you can use it again.