Data recovery ****, Waste of time and money.

TLDR: Sadly this crowd do not know what they are doing, besides taking your money, lying to you and wasting your time. Disgrace to the profession to be honest, to the ones who do know how to fix hardware and retrieve data.

Job: 1TB SSD Data recovery, Order number: JHBLD1448 I received a quote on the 16/05/2023 with a R2817.50 Non-Refundable fee, based on:

"Due to the diagnosis being an Electro Mechanical Failure, we will have to charge a re-assembly fee of R850.00 ex vat should you require your source drive back.

Do not hesitate to contact me should you require any further assistance."

Responding on 16/05/2023: "I am just confused with the "Mechanical" aspect, as there is nothing mechanical on the Solid State drive. Please include the reassembly.'

--No Response to email

After paying their quote (Even with the reason that didn't make sense) on the 16/05/2023, It was a grueling painful wait, and it was clear they had no idea what they were doing. I have no doubt the device was just placed on the shelf for the 10 weeks they had it.

On the 25/05/2023 Received: "The technician has informed me that the device is stabilizing for replication."

On the 01/06/2023: "The technician has informed me he is currently doing fault findings on the device"

On the 08/06/2023 & 13/06/2023 Received: "The technician has informed me that he is busy with off chip on the device"

On the 22/06/2023 Received: "The technician has informed me that he is currently busy with the fault finding."

I emailed them on the 23/06/2023: "Has the technician been able to read ANY data off the device? At what point will you determine that the data cannot be recovered?

The technician attempted to reball the BGA and place it on the PCB?"

On 26/06/2023 Received: "The technician has informed me that he has found 2 shorts on the PCB on the SSD, he is replacing those components. If he is not successful with the drive he will move onto the controller chip and work on it"

On 04/07/2023 Received: "The technician has informed me that he is busy with chip off recovery/ slow bit rate imaging

On 06/07/2023 Received: "The technician has informed me that he is trying to access nand data area"

On 11/07/2023 & 13/07/2023 Received: "The technician has informed me that he is still trying to access the Nand data area"

On 14/07/2023 Sent: "Has the technician identified the part number for the NAND flash? I am assuming that after the chip is removed, it is then reballed and placed into a socket or it is soldered onto another board so the data can be read off.

Was the SSD board X-rayed to determine whether all the ***** of BGA were making good contact?

Physically is the NAND Flash damaged? Is the Flash responding at all?

What is the data rate that the recovery reads the data off? There is 1TB of data, so I am concerned in terms of timelines regarding "slow bit rate imaging".

I believe that the SSD controller was working, as I could still detect it in Windows & Linux, however the SSD size was incorrect.

At what point will the technician determine that the data cannot be recovered? After 6 weeks? 8 weeks?"

--No Response to email

On the 18/07/2023 Received: "Our technicians have informed me that your data is fragmented, they are attempting to get better read results as data is only 50% of read rates due to the weak Nand chips."

(In other words, they can access the data)

On the 20/07/2023 Received: "The technician has informed me, we have done extensive research with our partners abroad and discovered that most of the SSD’S has *******/damaged firmware failure in the Nand data chips

causing the device to malfunction. Some devices suffer from weak Nand memory and there is a 50% chance of recovering the data due to this.

Unfortunately due to manufacturer constraints there is currently NO SOLUTION available for some brands of SSD’S.

We would suggest you leave it with us in our secure storage room until a solution becomes available or collect your device.

We are sorry for any delay or inconvenience caused during this process, we have truly exhausted all avenues up until now."

--SUMMARY-- The emails were utter nonsense, they didn't perform any work on the device.

When I received the device, after having to pay for a courier, it was clear that the device had not gone through the work that they had reported. Most certainly the memory chips were not removed, as there would be clear residue on the device having gone through a heat cycle in an oven.

This is just a ****. They will either take your device, or your money, and you will be left with nothing.