Recovery of a Burnt Samsung 980 Pro NVMe SSD

The Problem (Before)

An architecture student contacted us in an extreme state of panic. Just two days before his final graduation project deadline, his laptop suffered a catastrophic motherboard short circuit. The electrical surge did not stop at the motherboard; it traveled directly to the primary storage drive—a Samsung 980 Pro NVMe M.2 SSD. This drive contained his critical final project and three years’ worth of extensive architectural CAD and 3D modeling work.

The SSD was completely dead. It was no longer recognized by any system, and there were visible burn marks and melted components on the Printed Circuit Board (PCB).

The Solution (After)

After receiving the drive at the Datacodex labs, we performed an immediate micro-inspection under our electronic microscopes. The diagnostic showed that the power surge had obliterated the main controller chip and several power management resistors. Fortunately, the core NAND flash memory chips—where the actual data lives—survived the incident.

Our recovery protocols included:

1. Precision micro-soldering: Our engineers carefully removed the burnt components and cleaned the damaged PCB traces.
2. Chip-Off recovery: The NAND flash memory chips were safely un-soldered utilizing low-heat infrared re-work stations to prevent thermal degradation of the data.
3. The raw memory chips were read using specialized NAND readers.
4. Leveraging the advanced “PC-3000 Portable” hardware system, we virtually reconstructed the destroyed controller’s logic algorithm, decrypting and reassembling the fragmented data blocks from the raw memory dumps.

Final Result: We successfully rebuilt the file system and recovered 100% of the graduation project, along with his entire portfolio. The data was securely delivered to the student via a secure cloud download portal, allowing him to print and confidently present his project exactly on schedule. A disastrous loss of years of labor was entirely avoided.