What SSD data recovery costs. In sentences, because a table would imply more certainty than a sealed drive allows.

One drive is one price. It makes no difference whether the drive is a 120GB SATA drive out of a ten-year-old laptop or a 4TB NVMe stick out of a workstation, whether the badge says Samsung or a name you had never heard of until it failed, or whether it arrives as a bare stick, a portable in its case, or a MacBook with the flash soldered to the board: £300 + VAT, after a free look, with the figure in writing before any chargeable work.

Two or more drives that made up one volume are a set, and a set starts at £500 + VAT. That covers a two-bay NAS on SSDs, a four-stick carrier card in RAID 0, a striped portable, and a small server. The figure rises with the number of members and with what has been done to the set before it arrives; a rebuild that ran after a second failure is more work than a set that was simply powered down.

Enterprise storage — U.2 and SAS drives out of a SAN, a NetApp or Pure shelf, a hypervisor's datastore — starts at £1,250 + VAT. Priority handling, where the drive goes to the front of the bench, is quoted separately and only when you ask for it. VAT is added to every figure at the standard rate.

Reading the flash directly because the controller is dead, then rebuilding the controller's scrambling, interleaving and error correction in software, takes more bench time than a firmware fault that answers in the diagnostic state, and we say so before you agree. So does board-level work on a soldered or water-damaged drive, and so does a Mac whose logic board has to be brought back to life before its storage will unlock.

Encrypted volumes add a step once the drive is imaged, but not usually cost, provided you have the key. Multi-drive sets are priced by how many members there are and whether a rebuild has already been attempted. A drive another laboratory has already opened or flashed, or a drive a factory tool has been run against, sits outside the no data, no bill promise, and you are told that at the outset.

Logging, photographs and a read-only diagnosis on our own equipment, never in a computer that might send the drive a TRIM command. We identify the controller, check the firmware state and assess the flash. You then get an account of what we found, what we expect to recover, and one price. If you say no, the drive comes back to you at our expense, and nothing is owed.

Recovery software and the makers' own tools have their place: a healthy drive with a damaged file system, and TRIM switched off or not yet run. They read what the controller presents, so they cannot see a drive that is not detected, shows 0GB or calls itself SATAFIRM S11; there is nothing there for them to scan. On a deleted-file case, every hour a scan runs on a TRIM-enabled SSD is an hour of background erasing, and the software often installs itself onto the very drive it is meant to save.

The factory tools advertised on forums as a fix for SATAFIRM S11 and its cousins do something worse: they regenerate the drive, with a fresh empty map, and remove the record we would have used to find your files. The cheap option is fine when the drive is well. When it is not, it is often the last thing anyone gets to try, and the free look is where you find out which yours is.