Soldered SSD Data Recovery
No drive to remove. No problem.
Surface Pro, Dell XPS, Acer and MacBook laptops increasingly store everything on a single BGA chip soldered to the motherboard. There is no drive to pull out — only the chip itself, and a laboratory built to reach it.
The problem
Storage that can't be unplugged.
Manufacturers including Dell, HP, Acer and Apple increasingly solder SSD storage directly to the motherboard instead of fitting a removable drive.
It saves space and cost, and allows thinner designs — but it comes at the expense of the device's lifespan, and it makes data recovery far more complex if the storage fails. We've seen SSD failures on some models within just a couple of months, either from a fault or from heavy wear on the NAND flash chip itself.
What's inside
One BGA chip holds it all.
On laptops like these, there is no separate SSD to remove. A single ball-grid-array (BGA) chip soldered to the motherboard holds both the flash memory and its controller.
Microsoft Surface Pro
Most commonly built around an SK hynix multi-layer 176-layer 512 Gigabit (Gb) TLC 4D NAND flash chip.
Dell XPS 2-in-1
Typically fitted with Samsung NAND (KUS030202M) or Intel NAND (JBPT803500CT).
Acer & MacBook
Also increasingly built around soldered BGA storage rather than a removable drive.
Two routes
Motherboard repair, or moving the chip.
- 01
Repair the motherboard
Where possible, the fault stopping the laptop from powering on is repaired directly, so the original board runs again and the data can be copied off.
- 02
Or move the chip to a donor board
If the board itself can't be revived, the standard alternative is desoldering the BGA storage chip from the patient motherboard and resoldering it onto a matching, working donor board.
- 03
Why that gets expensive
A working donor motherboard alone can cost £500 upwards in parts before labour, which pushes a standard soldered-SSD job to somewhere between £3,000 and £6,000.
- 04
Our approach
We've put significant research and development into chip-off SSD recovery, and developed an alternative to the standard donor-board process that cuts this time-consuming, high-cost approach down considerably.
Encryption
Most soldered SSDs are also encrypted.
In around 95% of the cases we see, the storage is protected by Microsoft BitLocker, or by FileVault combined with Apple's T2 chip.
Recovering the data from the chip is only half the challenge. In either case, we also need the full decryption key — generally found in your Microsoft or Apple account — before the recovered data can be read.
Motherboard damage, chip type and encryption all affect what's possible on a soldered-SSD laptop. Get a straight assessment and a fixed quote before any repair goes ahead.