Successful data recovery

The situation

Phison SSE128GTTCR-S80 mSATA SSD — close-up of the board with two controllers, four NAND chips and two RAM modules
Phison SSE128GTTCR-S80: two control processors, four memory chips, two RAM modules on a single mSATA board — an atypical design with two sub-SSDs.

We never cease to be amazed at the devices PC component manufacturers are capable of producing. Take, for example, the SSD from manufacturer Phison, designated SSE128GTTCR-S80. This drive was installed in a laptop that had stopped working. The customer therefore removed the SSD with the aim of retrieving the stored data using a USB-port adapter.

There is nothing unusual about this approach — both an advanced user and an ordinary computer service can manage it. The problem arose the moment the USB adapter with the drive was connected to another computer:

  • The drive appeared in the operating system as uninitialized
  • None of the required data was visible

The customer assessed the situation correctly and contacted our laboratory.

Diagnostics — first impression

At first glance the delivered drive already looked unusual:

  • Two control processors
  • Four memory chips
  • Two RAM modules

Such a configuration is not common on an mSATA drive.

The finding — two sub-SSDs

On closer inspection we discovered that the drive in fact consists of two separate sub-SSDs:

  • The first (primary) sub-SSD — accessible on the standard contacts defined by the mSATA standard
  • The second (secondary) sub-SSD — accessible on the reserved contacts, which are normally neither used nor wired up

Once we had identified the individual SATA data lines, we were able to read the contents of both partial sub-SSDs separately.

Reconstruction — RAID 0 with no documentation

Hexadecimal analysis of Phison SSE128GTTCR-S80 RAID 0 metadata — determining stripe size and offsets
Hex dump of one of the sub-SSDs — from the metadata we determine the stripe size, drive order and offsets of the RAID 0 array.
Diagram of the Phison SSE128GTTCR-S80 RAID 0 layout — sector mapping between the two sub-SSDs
The reconstructed RAID 0 layout — how the data is striped across both sub-SSD chips.

But the recovery was far from over at that point. The two retrieved data blocks had to be combined into a single whole. Through deeper analysis we found:

  • The data was managed as a RAID 0 array (striping) across both sub-SSDs
  • By analyzing the metadata we determined the array geometry — stripe size, drive order, offsets

Only after this step did we gain access to the complete folder and file structure.

Recovered file structure from the Phison SSE128GTTCR-S80 — complete folder tree
Final reconstruction of the file system: the complete folder and file tree from the combined data of both sub-SSDs.

The result

  • 100% of the data recovered
  • 5 days of laboratory work, including metadata analysis
  • Complete file structure — no damaged indexes

The lesson

Although some data recovery cases may at first glance seem trivial, the opposite may be true. And so it holds once again that data recovery is a highly specialized activity, requiring a broad range of knowledge and experience.

Atypical designs (RAID within a single drive, proprietary Synology SHR formats, integrated NAND in MacBook T2/M1) are becoming ever more common today. Ordinary recovery programs cannot handle them — and a client who found themselves in the „an ordinary USB adapter won’t help" situation would not have been able to reach their data without our laboratory.

Do you have an atypical drive or SSD with data on it? Free diagnostics: Recovery enquiry · +420 775 556 063