SDR / Whatever it is doing now / Water or heat damage

Floods · spills · fire · a laptop that ran hot for years

Water, heat and the SSD. Dry is not the same as safe.

Water does not hurt flash chips quickly; corrosion on the board does, and it keeps going after the drive looks dry. A drive that was rinsed by a flood and dried on a radiator is often in worse shape than one sent to us still damp in a sealed bag. Do not power it, do not dry it with heat, and do not clean it. Put it in a bag as it is and post it. Heat is the other case: a laptop fire, a machine that ran at ninety degrees for two years, a controller cooked in a case with no airflow. Heat weakens the flash and can kill the controller, and the drive is imaged once, carefully, while it still reads. One drive is £300 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing.

Free first lookOne fixed figure in writingNo data, no bill on most jobsReturn postage paid

Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
0800 6890668

What water does to a board, and what heat does to flash.

Pure water is nearly harmless to electronics that are switched off. Tap water, flood water, coffee and seawater are not pure, and they leave salts and minerals on the board that draw moisture from the air and keep corroding copper long after the surface is dry. Powering a wet board is worse still: current flows where it should not, through the residue, and components short. A drive that was under water for an hour and never powered is a good job. A drive that dried out for a week and was then plugged in to see is a harder one.

On the bench a wet board is cleaned properly, ultrasonically where needed, inspected under magnification, and repaired where corrosion has eaten a trace or a component. Then it is powered once, in its diagnostic state, and imaged. On a soldered Mac or laptop the same cleaning and repair applies to the whole logic board, with the added constraint that the board itself has to run for encrypted storage to unlock; there is a page on soldered SSDs.

Heat is a different injury. Flash cells hold charge, and heat lets that charge drift, so a drive that spent its life at high temperature reads with more errors than one that did not. A short, intense heat, a fire, can kill the controller and blister the board while leaving the flash readable. A long, moderate heat, a laptop on a duvet for years, wears the flash quietly. Either way the drive is imaged once, with the weak pages retried carefully, and nothing else is asked of it.

What you see, and what it means.

Describe yours to us →

What you see	The usual reason	Where that leaves you
Flooded, never powered since	Residue on the board, corrosion starting	Clean, inspect, read; good odds
Flooded, dried, then powered	Shorts through the residue	Repair first; still often good
A spill on a laptop with a soldered drive	Board corrosion; the board must run to unlock	Board work; see soldered SSDs
Seawater	Fast corrosion	Send it wet, in a sealed bag, today
Fire, drive blackened	Controller often dead; flash often readable	Chip-off, or the controller moved
Ran hot for years, now erroring	Weakened flash	Image now, in careful passes

From the box arriving to your files going back.

Work we have closed →

Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free

A case number goes on it the day the parcel is opened, and an engineer settles what has actually failed before anything else happens. The drive is read on our own equipment, never in a computer that might send it a TRIM command. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.

Nothing to pay for lookingA single figure, put in writingNo TRIM, no writes

Powered on our terms

A wet or burnt drive is not powered at all on arrival. It is cleaned, dried properly, inspected under magnification and repaired where the board needs it, and only then brought up, once, in the controller's diagnostic state.

Vendor diagnostic modeNo hopeful reboots

Past the fault, to the map

Working code is loaded into the controller's memory rather than onto the flash, the service area is read, and the translation table is rebuilt from what is there. Where the controller itself is dead, the chips are read one by one and the controller's scrambling and error correction are undone in software.

Loader in RAM, never on the flashMapping tables put back together

A full image, then the volume

Nothing is worked on live. The whole drive is imaged once, weak pages retried in their own passes, and the file system is put back together on the image. Encrypted volumes are unlocked there too, with the key you supply, and never on the original.

One careful imageThe volume verified end to end

You see the file list before you pay

What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.

No charge until you accept the figureFresh media, supplied with the job3–5 days at the bench

From the bench

Send it wet. A sealed bag with the drive as it is beats a week on a radiator. The bench dries it the right way.
Do not rinse it. Even distilled water moves residue into places it was not. Leave it.
Heat-weakened flash reads once. Every extra pass on a cooked drive is a pass it may not survive. The bench reads it in one careful, well-planned image.
Seawater is a same-day job. Salt corrodes copper in hours. Post it today, and say on the form that it was seawater.

One job, followed all the way through.

UK · SDR-2026-0350JOB LOGGED ✓

A 2.5-inch Samsung 860 EVO from a ground-floor flat after a burst main

The PC sat in an inch of water overnight. The owner did the right things: pulled the plug at the wall, took the drive out, and sent it damp in a food bag without drying it. On the bench it was cleaned, a corroded regulator replaced, and the drive brought up once in its diagnostic state. It imaged whole. Twelve years of family photographs and the insurance paperwork for the flood itself came back.

100% of it recovered4 days here, and back by post

Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case

What helps, and what harms.

Do this much first

Unplug it at the wall and leave it off
Bag it as it is, wet if it is wet
Say what the water was: tap, flood, sea, coffee
Post it the same day if it was seawater

What sets us back

Drying it on a radiator or with a hairdryer
Rinsing it
Powering it to see whether it survived
Leaving it in a drawer for a month

Questions answered before you commit.

My SSD got wet. Is the data gone?

Rarely. Water does not hurt flash quickly; corrosion on the board does, and it is repaired. Do not power it, bag it as it is, and send it.

Should I dry it first?

No. Heat and time make corrosion worse. A sealed bag and a same-day parcel are the right answer.

The laptop went through a fire. Can anything be saved?

Often. A fire kills the controller more readily than the flash, and the flash is read directly, or the controller moved to a donor board on hardware-encrypted drives. The free look tells you honestly.

What does it cost?

£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look. Board repair that moves the figure is explained first.

How long does it take?

3–5 days at the bench for most water damage. Fire and heat-weakened flash are quoted with the figure.

Where this usually leads.

Soldered SSDs and spills →Snapped, cracked or burnt →Slow, errors, read-only →The laptop is dead →

Bag it as it is. Do not dry it.

The bench cleans and dries it the right way, repairs what corrosion has reached, and reads it once. The first look is free.

0800 6890668

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