SSD recovery pricing confuses people, and fairly: the drives are smaller and simpler-looking than hard drives — no motors, no moving parts — so why do quotes sometimes come back higher? And why do some shops refuse SSD work entirely?
Here’s the honest structure of it.
The short answer
- Logical failures on a working SSD — deleted files, corrupted file system, lost partitions — price like any logical recovery. At my bench: $150–$300.
- Failed-drive cases — the SSD vanished, bricked itself, or won’t identify — are where SSD pricing diverges. When they’re workable, they run mid-hundreds to $1,000+ depending on the controller family, and a meaningful fraction aren’t practically recoverable at all.
That second category deserves an explanation, because it’s where SSD economics get genuinely different.
Why dead SSDs are harder than dead hard drives
A hard drive’s data layout is fundamentally readable: get the platters spinning and the heads flying — even in a donor chassis — and the sectors are where the file system says they are. An SSD is different. Its controller constantly shuffles data between NAND chips for wear leveling, and the only record of where anything currently lives is the controller’s own translation map. When the controller dies, you don’t just lose the reader — you lose the map.
Recovery then means either reviving the controller (possible for some controller families with known service modes) or reading the NAND chips directly and reconstructing the map’s logic — controller-specific puzzle work. And there’s a wall: most modern SSDs encrypt everything in hardware by default, with the key living in the controller. If that key is unreachable, the NAND contents are ciphertext, and no lab on earth recovers that at any price.
This is why honest SSD quotes come after identifying the exact drive and failure — and why “we recover all SSDs, guaranteed” is a claim you should walk away from.
One useful bright spot
SSDs that fail from wear (rather than sudden controller death) often enter a read-only failure mode by design — the drive locks itself against writes but still reads. Those recoveries are straightforward and land at the low end of pricing. Sudden-death failures are the expensive ones; slow-decline failures are often cheap. It’s the reverse of how people expect it to work.
What the evaluation is for
With SSDs, the free evaluation matters more than for any other device, because the answer to “is this recoverable, and for what price?” swings from “$150, by Friday” to “not at any price” based on details you can’t see from outside: controller model, encryption status, failure mode. You should not pay anything to find out which one you have. My evaluation is free and the quote that follows is firm — and if the answer is “this one isn’t recoverable,” you’ll hear it plainly and pay nothing.
Free evaluation. If it can't be recovered, you pay nothing.
The bottom line
Logical SSD problems price like normal recovery work: $150–$300. Dead SSDs are case-by-case: some revive affordably, some are $1,000+ specialist jobs, and some are cryptographically out of reach forever. The only responsible first step is an evaluation that costs you nothing — and the takeaway for everyone else reading this before a failure: SSDs fail suddenly and sometimes absolutely. Back up like it.
SSD failed with your files on it? Start a case with the drive model and the story — I’ll tell you honestly which category it falls in.