Why does data recovery fail to work on SSD?

SSD shorted for Solid State Drives gains popularity these days. It plays a same role as HDD or external drives, but it works differently from those traditional storage devices. Then file recovery from SSD is no longer an easy task. It’s not difficult to understand why solid state drive is a big challenging or barrier to data recovery industry. First, let’s see how files recovery happens to traditional storage devices.

You might have learnt that when system deleted a file, the file won’t be erased totally. In fact, file system only makes it as deleted. If users just delete important due to sheer carelessness, then data loss may bring about server problem to small business. As lost data can be customer contacts, order details, marketing plans, staff information, etc. The most frustrating case is that deleted files do not have a recent backup copy. If data recovery software comes to rescue, then you can save your company from closing down. How does operating system detect whether a file is deleted or not? File system of a partition is in charge of managing files and tells operating system which file is deleted and which disk sector is available to save new data. Hard drive keeps deleted files until their sectors are occupied by new data. Recovery software scans disk sectors and retrieves missing files and help users save them again. However, this process works no longer the same on solid state drives.

SSD uses totally different components from traditional hard drives and works in a different way. It stores data on a flash memory and has limitations to times of writing and reading data. For that reason it adopts special technology which is known as trim to protect SSD and decrease unnecessary read or write action. So what happens when a file is deleted from SSD? Files will be totally deleted from SSD when deletion happens, which improves speeds but rises trouble to data recovery. It’s difficult to undelete files from SSD and it’s equally difficult to recover formatted data from SSD. Thus we can make backups for files and prevent data loss from SSD.

As to data loss caused by HDD physical problem, users can seek help from recovery companies which can open HDD and retrieve data from platters. Such solution won’t works well on SSDs, for they don’t have platters and store data on memory chips. When you get error message like “Windows detected a hard disk problem”, you’ll have to backup data as soon as possible.

It’s easy to backup data hard drive or USB drive, but few users will do that. Because they think backup takes time and disk space. However, we can backup data for SSD and use hard drive recovery software to safeguard data for other storage devices. Since files stored on computer are important to us, we should be responsible for their safety.