How To Recover Data From TRIM Enabled SSDs?

Solid State Drive (SSD) is an electronic storage device, which has become much popular in the past few years because of its various advantages. SSDs are fast, sturdy, compact, noiseless, and hence have been replacing the hard disk drives (HDDs), particularly when faster performance is desired and the price is not the first consideration. SSDs are also used with devices like mobile phones because of their compactness and are a boon to such devices.

Further, HDDs – being mechanical drives – are prone to failure as compared to SSDs, which makes data loss more likely in the case of HDDs. However, when compared to HDDs, the process of data recovery is more complicated in the case of SSDs. There are warning signs, which indicate that the SSD is going to fail.

Why? It’s because of a mechanism called Garbage Collection that runs on all the SSDs and the TRIM command that runs on the supported SSDs (TRIM command isn’t supported by all the SSDs). They run in coordination with each other to remove the deleted data and vacate space for new data. However, in HDDs, these don’t work, and hence, data isn’t gone for a toss unless overwritten.

In this blog, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about data recovery from SSD in the TRIM environment, and the prevention of data loss caused due to TRIM.

We’ll also discuss in detail about the TRIM command and will talk about the Garbage Collection process, as the TRIM command works in coordination with it.

How does the TRIM command make SSD Recovery complicated?

The TRIM command enhances the performance of an SSD, but as said, it makes the data recovery complicated. As you delete a file, the TRIM command is issued by the OS to the SSD about the deletion. This notification to SSD prevents unnecessary copying of deleted/stale data by the Garbage Collection mechanism, which in turn improves the performance. Now the Garbage Collection does its second job and removes this stale data, making it complicated to recover.

This is what exactly happens when Garbage Collection runs with TRIM:

1. Valid data is copied and relocated to an empty block—memory space comprised of hundreds of pages.
2. Invalid/stale – Unable to copy the data
3. The whole block, where the data was copied from is purged.
4. The block gets emptied and freed up to be written.

SSDs with TRIM support may not be recovered with the help of data recovery software alone. Data recovery in such cases needs complex techniques which could be carried out only by Professional Data Recovery Service providers.

The Data Recovery Service experts employ various innovative and proprietary techniques to recover data from SSD. Do you want to disable TRIM to allow copying of stale data along with valid data when you delete it? Let’s see how we can do it on Windows.

How to Disable TRIM on Windows?

Note:

1. Disabling TRIM reduces the performance of SSD.
2. TRIM would stop working for data deleted after disabling it.
3. Keeping TRIM disabled may help in data recovery, provided you’ve stopped using your SSD as soon as you lose data.

You can disable TRIM to prevent it to run on your SSD by following the steps given below:

Step#1: Click the START button and type cmd.

Step#2: Right-click Command Prompt.

 

Step#3: Click Run as Administrator to launch command prompt as an Admin.

Step#4: Type fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 1 and hit Enter.

 

Step#5: Type fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify and hit Enter to check if it is disabled or not.

If the result is DisableDeleteNotify = 1; TRIM is disabled.

NOTE: If you want to enable TRIM, replace 1 in the command fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 1 by 0.

Conclusion

In this blog, we discussed data handling with TRIM and Garbage Collection process in SSDs and the need for a Professional Data Recovery Service provider due to the complications involved.

It’s comparatively easy to recover data from SSDs in a Non-TRIM environment, as the SSDs doesn’t get notified about the deletion. Hence, they keep copying your data to a new empty block. But the data recovery isn’t impossible even in a TRIM environment. Data Recovery Experts can still recover data. So, don’t lose hope, stop using your SSD, and contact a Data Recovery Expert for help.