Why SSD May Not Be The Smart Data Storage Purchases After All

They were touted as superior to the traditional hard drive; however, do not think this does not mean SSD's will not cause business owners to skip calling data recovery services in the local area for help. Solid-state drives may not be any better at protecting files than the traditional drives that spin at around 7,500 RPM and more a moment. Business owners may still find themselves setting aside funds for data recovery in the local area. Why nonvolatile storage isn't driving a better choice for data storage?



Solid-state drives may fail because of their dependency on workload history. If a business uses flash memory, a solid-state hard drive may require out-of-place updates. If there is not enough spare capacity for these updates, it may lead to blocking-wise erasure and fragmentation. The fragmentation in itself is a problem because it could affect the drive's performance overall.

Why do businesses need hard drive recovery if they face these Problems

In some cases, the data from a solid-state drive cannot be recovered using standard hard disk recovery services, as it can if a company is using a traditional hard drive that fails and they must rely on a professional to perform data recovery. Experts may not be able to retrieve data after the fact; however, it is possible to increase spare capacity so that your nonvolatile storage has enough memory for out-of-place updates. It is also possible to use right amplification to provide a higher performance of random writes, decreasing the chances that the solid-state drive will fragment space it needs for updates and erase needed data.



One study showed that improving higher spare capacity also improved random write speed of a single SSD of up to 19 times more. This may possibly make solid-state drives as useful as traditional hard drives, which may sometimes need hard disk recovery and a professional's touch in order to view data after undergoing hard disk recovery in the local area.

Should a business foregone using a solid-state drive with their Raid 5 or higher systems?

Given the solutions that are available these days in data recovery services, using nonvolatile storage's is no longer as devastating to businesses that need reliable data solutions. The problems with an SSD's random writing can be fixed when improving the speed at which those random writes occur and speeding up the parity-less drives so that they offer a higher spare storage capacity.

If the problems with informational bottlenecks and slower write speeds could be overcome, primary storage devices may be used in more critical data operations and businesses may be able to lower their hard disk recovery costs spent annually.

There is a lot of controversial information circulating regarding the recovery of SSD drives. The purpose of this article is an attempt to clarify what, when and how can be recovered in the very specific case of SSD drives.

Why SSD Drives Are Different

There is no slightest doubt that solid-state (SSD) drives are very different compared to traditional hard disk drives (HDD). The obvious part, of course, is the use of flash chips to keep information instead of rotating plates and moving heads as in traditional disks. But that's not what makes them so alien to modern data recovery tools.

Your familiar USB flash drives and memory cards such as those used in smartphones, digital cameras, MP3 players and e-book readers are also using flash chips to keep information - but recovering deleted files from memory cards and USB drives is no different from recovering files from hard drives. So what sets SSD's apart is not the underlying technology but something that runs on top of it.

SSD Data Recovery - The reason why SSD drives are so unpredictable when it comes to data recovery are their background garbage collection and write leveling mechanisms combined with the existence (and operation) of the TRIM command. Not going into much technical detail (hundreds of publications are available on those mechanisms), SSD's continuously clean up space marked as "available" via the TRIM command which is issued by the operating system every time you, the operating system or an application deletes a file or formats the disk.

Space marked as available will be sooner or later physically cleaned by the garbage collection mechanism that runs in background. You can never predict when exactly space occupied by a particular deleted file will be cleaned up. And the worst part is you really cannot stop this to happen. Even if you remove the disk and place it into another computer, and even if you use a sophisticated "write blocker" device, garbage collection will still commence no matter what the moment you power up the drive.

The Hope

As you see, the culprit here is the TRIM command being issued at the time you delete a file. However, the TRIM command will not be issued if at least one of the following is true.

1. The operating system does not support TRIM. Windows Vista, XP and older don't! Only Windows 7 and up support and issue the TRIM command. So if your disk was used with Windows XP, Vista or older system, you can forget about TRIM and just recover your files as if your SSD was a hard disk.
2. The file system is not NTFS. At this time, TRIM is only supported on NTFS drives. This is a limitation of the Windows operating system, but you can use it to your benefit. If the disk is formatted with FAT, you can safely recover deleted files.
3. The disk was not connected directly via SATA. TRIM is an ATA command, meaning that if your disk was connected to your PC via a USB cord, or if it was used in a network attached storage (NAS) device, or if it was part of a RAID array, the TRIM command will not be issued.
4. TRIM was disabled in Windows settings. Yes, you can disable TRIM. This will significantly shorten the lifespan of your SSD drive, and bring you very sluggish write speeds very soon, but sometimes you may have good reasons to disable TRIM.

Tools to Recover Files from SSD Drives

In order to recover files from SSD drives, you use the same file recovery (RS File Recovery) or data recovery (RS Partition Recovery, RS NTFS Recovery or RS FAT Recovery) tools as you do with hard drives. The only thing that is different: there is much less of a success guarantee.