| Data
Recovery from Flash SSDs? |
Editor:-
if the
flash SSD market
reaches the levels of penetration predicted by many
analysts - then in a
handful of years nearly half of all new notebook PCs will use flash SSDs instead
of hard disk drives.
What
happens when those SSDs inevitably fail - and there's no
backup?
Most
consumers don't do regular backups - and most small businesses don't either.
When
hard drives fail, get
submerged in
water or get damaged in fires - the solution of last resort - is to call a
data recovery company.
These superheroes can often recover a lot of data - even if the pcbs
and chips in the disk drive have been damaged. Superheroes don't come cheap.
The cost for a difficult recovery can run into thousands of dollars (for a
single disk) but for many satisfied customers that's a much better result than
being left with no business or months of lost time rewriting reports, novels
etc.
Although flash SSDs are new to the consumer market - they've been
around for many
years in markets which absolutely needed their levels of ruggedness (and
could bear the high cost). So you may be thinking that there's a well
established industry already out there ready to process your flash SSD - if you
are unlucky enough to need a data recovery service today.
You would be
wrong.
The reason is that the biggest traditional customers of flash
SSDs have been the military
or industrial users who didn't want enemies / competitors stealing their
secrets.
Erstwhile flash SSD manufacturers like
Adtron,
BiTMICRO and
STEC (who all make SSDs
whose performance or capacity leave
Samsung's SSDs in the
dust BTW) specialise in having on-board
disk sanitization
of various forms to make sure that that the data is never recovered by the wrong
people.
So there isn't a public track record of data recovery for
flash SSDs.
The closest that the market has to offer - is experience
with recovering data from simple
flash memory storage
(like USB keyring style
devices or camera memory cards). Unlike SSDs - those devices aren't designed for
intensive write applications - and there is nothing very complicated between the
interface controller and the flash chips themselves. So if the controller gets
zapped by static - or crunched by your car driving over it - the data is
relatively easy for experts to recover from the flash chips.
That isn't
the case with most flash SSDs - which use complicated controller technology to
extend the reliability
and speed of storage. The architecture inside a high performance SSD is more
complicated than that in most
RAID systems. The
algorithms which map addresses to physical media locations vary from
manufacturer to manufacturer - and in many cases - like the formula for making
Coke or Pepsi - the details are closely guarded commercial secrets.
Data
recovery (at the single SSD level) is not so much of a problem for datacenter
applications - because most often the SSDs are in some kind of RAID protected
array - and are also backed up (internally or externally) to other disks.
But
one thing missing in the consumer notebook SSD market is a clear signal by oems
- that data in their devices can be easily recovered - if there is no backup
- or the backup failed. Maybe the next generation of products will address that
issue.
Although flash SSDs are inherently much more
reliable than hard
drives - that's no consolation for the customers who will be the pioneers in SSD
data recovery. | |
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