Frequently asked questions
Answers to common questions about SSD data recovery. For the full service details, see our SSD Data Recovery page.
It depends on what the problem is and how the device responds to any temporary repairs made (e.g firmware modifications or PCB repairs). On average, the Economy service takes 5 days to 3 weeks, and 4 to 6 weeks for a failed controller or other complex issues.
Our Priority and Emergency service costs more but is much faster, in some cases you could get the data back within 24 hours.
Our Economy service costs between $350 and $1,750. Priority and Emergency service cost more because they give you a faster turnaround or have us work outside business hours, including weekends and public holidays.
No, the cost is the same. Most of the work on our side is fixing the initial problem so we can access your data at all, whether that’s electronic repairs, chip-off recovery, fixing a firmware problem or cloning an SSD with read errors. That initial part is the majority of the cost.
Backing up your files and folders is the very final stage, and the transfer to a new external drive is generally very quick and automated with software, so recovering only some files doesn’t reduce the price.
Your recovered files come back on an external drive. You can supply your own, or we can supply one from $180. The drive is formatted to suit the device the data came from: Mac format for Apple computers and Windows format for Windows computers, unless you ask for a different format when you approve the quote. Tell us which computer you will use the data on and we will format the drive to suit.
Yes. Every SSD gets a free assessment and a written quote before any recovery work starts.
About 90% of our jobs are no fix, no fee. The hardest 10% carry an attempt fee, for work that takes a long time, has a lower chance of success or needs donor parts. The attempt fee is part of the total quoted price, not an extra. You pay it to begin, and if the recovery is successful you pay the remaining balance. If the recovery is not successful, the attempt fee is the only cost. Where an attempt fee applies, it is stated in your quote before you approve anything.
We have two offices in NSW, one in Victoria and one in Queensland. Customers in Adelaide and Perth can use our secure drop-off offices, and we forward drives from there to our main NSW office free of charge.
Fill in the job form on our website to get your job number and an address label. Wrap the drive in 2 to 3 cm of bubble wrap and put your job number in the package. You can send it by post or courier at your own cost. Never give the courier authority to leave it. Ask for tracking and a signature on delivery. We recommend insurance, even $5 to $10 worth, because couriers then photograph where they delivered the parcel.
Yes. Complete the job form first, then follow the packing steps in “How do I send you my SSD?” above. Send only the SSD, or the whole laptop if the SSD is built in, with no cables, chargers or cases. Use a cardboard box, never a padded envelope.
If we recover your data and you pay, return delivery is free. International customers are always welcome.
Complete the job form, then drop your device off or post it to us. You can drop it at our Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane CBD office and we’ll start as quickly as possible. If you are in Adelaide or Perth, you can use our secure drop-off offices there, and we forward your SSD to our main NSW office free of charge. Most recovery work is done at our main lab in Rhodes, NSW, and we never send your device to another company to recover.
Yes. An urgent assessment costs $150. We stop what we’re doing and look at your drive straight away. Please allow one to two hours for diagnostics, and we’ll quote you the same day.
Every job has three service levels. Economy is our standard service. Priority and Emergency are faster and cost more, because our data recovery engineers work on weekends and after hours and stop work for other customers to speed up your job. Your quote shows the price and turnaround for each level, and you choose.
Yes, in most cases. When a portable SSD such as a Samsung T7 stops showing up, the cause is often a firmware or controller fault inside the drive. Please do not reformat it, and do not run recovery software on it.
See how we cloned a 4TB Samsung T7 Shield that was not recognised, and how a firmware repair saved 12,000 music files from a portable SSD.
Yes, in most cases we can.
Most problems can be fixed. It’s simply a matter of skilled data recovery engineers spending time and resources needed and using our proven methods, allowing us to recover your data in a safe and professional way.
We have a high success rate for common problems, such as drives with Bad Sectors/Read Errors (working very slowly), a damaged PCB (not powering on), a firmware corruption, a file system or partition corruption or simple data access problem due to being unable to connect the hard drive to your computer to make a backup .
If for some reason the data cannot be recovered, we will let you know the reason and provide you with as much information as we can.
Our economy service is our best value for money option, the lowest priced option.
If you’re looking for another, a more affordable way to pay for our data recovery service, we do offer four alternative options for paying by instalments, including Afterpay, Zip, Klarna, which is K-L-A-R-N-A, and PayPal Pay in 4. So if it does help, we do have pay by instalment options available. There’s no extra charge from us. You just need to have an account with those providers, and when you pay for our service, those options are always available on the payment options list.
We also do accept credit cards, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express as well.
But yes, there’s no cheaper option. And we find that compared to our competitors, we’re very competitive. Often our prices are cheaper than most companies.
And if for some reason that you wanted to go with someone else, it’s an obligation-free assessment. Then there’s no pressure to go ahead, once you get a quote from us.
Discount codes, partner discounts and promotional offers apply to the attempt fee and the completion fee. They do not apply to a hard drive or SSD we sell as a destination drive. Promotional prices shown on a quote are valid for 14 days from the date of the quote.
The most important thing to do is to power off the SSD or computer, stop using it and do not let anybody tamper with it, or to try and use any software that will modify the disk. This will greatly improve the chances of your data being recovered successfully.
In our lab we use Atola Insight Forensic or PC3000 Portable to check for read errors, bad sectors and drive health.
At home, the free tool CrystalDiskInfo shows caution, warning or failure messages and the drive’s usage hours.
Back up your important files as soon as possible.
If it is still stable, back up all your data, then replace the SSD and do not use it again.
Signs of read errors include very slow or laggy performance on certain folders, some files copying while other folders hang the computer, or errors when copying files off.
Usually the file system is damaged or the partition is unreadable.
Yes. You can upgrade to Priority or Emergency at any time by contacting us, and we’ll confirm the new price.
Yes. We recover data from Intel SATA and NVMe SSDs, including the 600p, 660p and 670p series, older SATA models, Optane products, and enterprise DC and P series drives. We also recover from Solidigm SSDs, the successor to Intel’s SSD business.
Prices are in Australian dollars and include GST unless the quote says otherwise. Return delivery after a successful recovery is free within Australia and to New Zealand. The only extra cost is a destination drive if you need us to supply one. We do not charge by the hour, so a job that takes longer does not cost you more.
Sometimes, if you act quickly. After a delete or format, TRIM tells the SSD which blocks are no longer needed, and its garbage collection erases them later, at a time set by the model and firmware. Turn the computer off straight away and do not install or run any recovery software.
We use specialist firmware tools to try to rebuild the drive’s internal data map before that happens. The assessment is free. Because this is a special case, an attempt fee applies before work begins. It is part of the total price, not an extra. See how we recovered a formatted Crucial SSD.
Your data stays private. We only look at it as far as needed to do the recovery, and we handle personal information under the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles. After you collect your recovered data, or we post it to you, we keep a backup copy for two weeks in case you need another copy. After that the backup copy is erased for your privacy.
Yes. Many modern laptops and Macs have the SSD soldered directly to the logic board. We have the tools and expertise to recover data from these built-in SSDs, including Apple Macs, Microsoft Surface devices, and thin laptops from Dell, HP, Lenovo and others. We handle both soldered NVMe and eMMC storage, and success depends on the condition of the chips and the type of failure.
SSDs are not damaged by shock the way hard drives are.
For an external USB SSD, check for a bent or damaged USB port.
For a SATA or NVMe SSD without an enclosure, look closely for bends, cracks or hairline fractures in the circuit board.
Phone 1300 444 800 within Australia, email help@payam.com.au, or complete the contact form and we will call you back. International customers are always welcome, and email is the easiest way to reach us from overseas.
Yes. You can pay by card (Visa, Mastercard, American Express), Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link, PayPal or bank deposit (EFT). If you need more time, you can split the cost into instalments with Afterpay, Zip, Klarna or PayPal Pay in 4, using the account you already have.
Yes. Just give us your company name and ABN when you book in, or before you pay, and we’ll put them on your tax invoice.
No. We give you back the data we recover. We keep a backup copy for two weeks after handover so you can check your files and copy them somewhere safe. After that, we securely erase our copy with KillDisk. Any drive we sell you carries the manufacturer’s warranty, which is usually two years for most brands, though it varies.
We specialise in professional data recovery from solid-state drives (SSDs), including SATA, NVMe, M.2, external USB-C portable SSDs, and enterprise SAS SSDs. Our lab has successfully recovered data from SSDs made by the following manufacturers (and many others).
Most popular SATA and NVMe SSD brands:
- Samsung (870 EVO, 860 EVO, 970/980/990 Pro, PM series, and others)
- Western Digital / WD (Blue, Black, Green, SN series NVMe)
- SanDisk (SSD Plus, Extreme, and related models)
- Crucial / Micron (MX500, BX500, P-series, T-series NVMe)
- Kingston (A400, KC series, NV2, NV3, Fury Renegade)
- Intel (SATA and NVMe, including 600p, 660p, 670p, 545s, 535, 520, 320, Optane, DC series and P series such as P4500, P4510 and P4610; Intel’s SSD business was sold to SK hynix and is now Solidigm)
- Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory, EXCERIA and enterprise lines)
- Seagate (Barracuda, FireCuda, IronWolf)
- ADATA / XPG (SU series, Legend, and gaming models)
- SK hynix / Solidigm (consumer and enterprise NVMe)
- Lexar
- Silicon Power
- TeamGroup / T-Force
- Corsair (Force, MP series)
- Patriot
- PNY
- Transcend
- Sabrent (Rocket series)
- Gigabyte
- ASUS
- Inland (Micro Center)
External USB-C portable SSDs:
- Samsung (T5, T7, T9, T7 Shield, and related portable models)
- SanDisk (Extreme Portable, Extreme Pro, Extreme Pro with USB4)
- Seagate (portable and external SSDs)
- LaCie (Rugged SSD, Rugged SSD Pro, Rugged SSD Pro5, owned by Seagate)
- Western Digital / WD
- Toshiba / Kioxia
- Lexar
- Crucial (X-series and portable models)
- Kingston (XS series and portable SSDs)
- ADATA
- Corsair
- TeamGroup
- Other USB-C and Thunderbolt portable SSDs
Enterprise and SAS SSDs:
- Samsung (enterprise PM and SAS series)
- Seagate (Nytro series)
- Western Digital / Ultrastar (including HGST heritage)
- Kioxia (enterprise and SAS models)
- Micron
- SK hynix / Solidigm
- SSSTC (Solid State Storage Technology Corporation)
- Other enterprise SAS and NVMe SSDs from major manufacturers
Additional and emerging brands:
Biwin, Kimtigo, Colorful, ZHITAI (YMTC consumer brand), Netac, Hikvision, Innodisk, Apacer, ATP Electronics, Plextor, OWC (Other World Computing), MSI, G.Skill, and numerous OEM, industrial and regional brands.
We recover from virtually all SSD brands. The list highlights the most common, but our services are not limited to these. Recovery success depends on the specific failure mode (controller issues, firmware problems, NAND chip damage and so on), not solely on the brand. We work with both consumer and enterprise SSDs, including high-capacity models used in servers and AI and data centre environments. For external USB-C and Thunderbolt SSDs (LaCie, SanDisk Extreme, Samsung T-series and others), we can often recover data even when the enclosure or bridge has failed. All recoveries are performed in a professional lab environment with strict data security and confidentiality.
We are your best chance of getting your data back successfully in good condition. We know what to do, how to do it and will always do it in a safe and professional way.
Our team of data recovery engineers uses specialised hardware, software, and technology built for this work. E.g BGA chip-off/rework/reballing equipment, firmware repair technology, and chip-off capability.
Our company is one of only a few in the world to use both Ace Labs PC-3000 SSD, Deepspar SSD disk imager and Atola Forensic SSD tools.
Our data recovery engineers across four labs work together to help solve your problem and get your files back.
We will always be honest, answer all of your questions and keep you updated during the data recovery process.
We connect the SSD to hardware imaging tools such as DeepSpar Disk Imager or PC3000.
If it is recognised with the correct model and capacity and can be cloned sector by sector with no read errors, slow sectors or hard rereads, it is a logical issue such as a partition or file system problem.
If it cannot be detected, recognised or cloned, it is a hardware fault.
Within Australia, if you don’t want to go ahead there’s no charge. You can pick it up from our office, organise your own courier to collect it, or pay $20 for return delivery, which covers shipping and handling to return it to you by Australia Post.
A quote is valid for 30 days from the date we send it, unless it says otherwise. Promotional prices shown on a quote are valid for 14 days from the date of the quote.
Yes. You tell us which files matter most. Before you pay for the recovery, we’ll send you a list of your recovered files so you can check them. If any of the files you listed are missing, tell us and we’ll search again.
If you want the device back, ask when you approve the quote. We repair a device only as far as needed to recover the data, so most devices are not returned in working condition, and opening it to test it can mark, crack or destroy the case.
First published 21 October 2026, 10:19 PM AEDT. Last updated 23 October 2026, 1:04 AM AEDT.
The information on this page is provided by Payam Toloo, founder and owner of Payam Data Recovery. This content is copyright and may not be reproduced on other websites without written permission. You are welcome to quote or reference it with a link to this page.
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Phone: 1300 444 800 (within Australia)
International: +61 2 80766079
Email: help@payam.com.au
International customers are always welcome. The easiest way to reach us from overseas is by email at help@payam.com.au, which works in every time zone.
