[Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

[Richard Pieri]

MBR wrote:
> While it's true that any medium can fail with no warning, if your data's
> on a spinning magnetic platter, the most likely modes of failure do not
> destroy all the data on the platter.

Head crash. Opening up a crashed drive is quite the mess.

Reading data from "dead" flash chips is very real, and very possible.
The real difficulty is that the ATA trim command eventually erases
blocks that could otherwise be used to recover data from damaged chips.
That said, if the device is disconnected from power after failure and
before trim can execute then the controller can be replaced with one
that won't honor trim commands and will permit recovery of data.

-- 
Rich P.