Is trying to read a faulty SSD going to cause more damage to it?

[Mon12]

I have a faulty SSD here. Attempting to power on and read the SSD, like, if I were to try and raw read the whole disk, that won't damage it more? Like with an HDD? Is it a risk that I should be paying attention to and manage in some way? If I tried to read data off it like this, would I have to expect that maybe halfway through it all it all dies and even professional data recovery can't save the data from it then?

Also I read that if the controller has a problem then the data can be saved by putting the memory part of the SSD into another, intact SSD of the exact same model. Is this always doable?

 

[david123]

Read does not damage SSD storage. Write does wear it out.

If the controller is bad, and you want to recover the content, probably better consult professional data recovery. Remove the NAND out of SSD and put it to another SSD needs some special tools. You're probably not good at it.

 

[toast0]

All my experience with failing SSDs, they just disappeared from the databus with no trace. Personally, yeah, I'd try ddrescue unless you think you would actually pay a data recovery company, in which case don't touch it, just leave it powered off until you talk to the data recovery people and they tell you how to get it to them.

I wouldn't bet on good things happening from transplanting nand chips, but also, I'd expect the problem to be in the nand chip, either bad bits in your data, bad bits in the data for the controller, or the controller wrote some bad data for itself that gets it into an unrecoverable state. That seems more likely to me than a controller failure that could be resolved with a swap. Unless the controller let out some magic smoke.