Soldered SSD Data Recovery
The SSD is soldered to the board. Your data isn't gone.
Surface Pro, Dell XPS, Acer and MacBook laptops increasingly store everything on a single BGA chip soldered to the motherboard. It's a hard failure mode to reach — but not an unrecoverable one.
The problem
Storage you can't unplug.
On a growing number of laptops, there is no removable drive to pull out and image.
Dell, HP, Acer and Apple already use, or are moving towards, SSDs soldered directly onto the motherboard as a single BGA package — controller and NAND flash combined in one chip. It saves space and cost for the manufacturer, and lets laptops get thinner.
It also shortens the practical lifespan of the storage and makes a failed drive much harder to recover from. We see soldered SSDs fail from wear on the NAND chips within a couple of months on some models, well before the laptop itself is old.
Coverage
The soldered SSD laptops we see most.
Microsoft Surface Pro
Most commonly built around an SK hynix 176-layer, 512Gb (Gigabit) TLC 4D NAND flash package soldered to the board.
Dell XPS 2-in-1
Found with either a Samsung KUS030202M or an Intel JBPT803500CT NAND package, depending on the production run.
Apple MacBook
Soldered storage on the logic board, frequently paired with FileVault and T2 chip encryption.
Acer and other modern ultrabooks
More manufacturers are following the same design, trading user-replaceable storage for a thinner chassis.
In the lab
Reaching data on a dead soldered SSD.
A laptop with a soldered SSD stores everything — including the controller — in one BGA chip on the motherboard. There is no drive to swap.
The conventional approach is one of two routes: repair the motherboard enough to bring the laptop back to life, or desolder the BGA chip from the faulty board and solder it onto a working donor motherboard to read it. Both are precise, board-level work.
The donor-board route in particular is expensive. A working donor motherboard alone can cost from £500 upwards in parts, and a full job by this method can easily run to £3,000–£6,000 once labour is added. We've invested heavily in chip-off SSD recovery to bring that cost and turnaround down, because soldered storage is only going to become more common.
Encryption
BitLocker and T2 are usually part of the case.
Around 95% of the soldered SSDs we see are also encrypted — Microsoft BitLocker on Windows devices, or FileVault with Apple's T2 chip on MacBooks. Either way, recovering readable data needs the decryption key, which is normally recoverable from your Microsoft or Apple account.
Whatever the laptop or the fault, it's worth an assessment before any board repair goes ahead. Get in touch to talk through what happened and what it will cost to find out.
Get a straight view on what's recoverable from a Surface Pro, Dell XPS, Acer or MacBook with a soldered SSD, and a fixed quote before any board work begins.