Apple SSD Recovery Options

[drrecovery]

Hey everyone,

I’m working on trying to recover a failing Apple SSD drive. This drive is the 12+16 pin, from ~2013-2015.

Symptoms/What I’ve tried:
- After attaching the drive to my iMac, it will disconnect on its own after a couple minutes.
- If I am quick, I can navigate the file system a couple of folders deep before Finder locks up, and the drive eventually disappears.
- If I try to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the disk once it has mounted, my iMac will lock up and crash.
- I can boot into Recovery Mode from the drive, but as soon as I try to access the file system via Terminal, it will lock up and disappear. I have run First Aid on the drive from Recovery Mode and it checks out fine. I’ve also mounted it on a Windows system and tested the drive with a couple of other utilities and I am not getting any sector errors or anything reporting back.
- If I mount it on my PC (using MacDrive), the data partition doesn’t every show up (only an “Update” partition). It will similarly disappear after a couple minutes.
- A coworker suggested I attempt to duplicate, disk-to-disk, so I purchased a Tableau TD2u duplicator and attempted this (using the USB interface while both source and target drives were in an enclosure), but it fails after 2 minutes or less when the source drive disappears. The error that comes back is simply “unexpected error occurred” or the like.

I’m at a loss as to what to do next. Any suggestions on how to find out what component on the drive is failing?

Thanks in advance!

[Arch Stanton]

Send it to a data recovery lab?

[fzabkar]

Can you start by retrieving a SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo or GSmartControl?

[crackz0r]

You said you've tried to clone the drive with a TD2u. Does the drive get hot during the process?
Sort of sounding to me like a possible over-heating issue if it is getting extremely hot to the touch.

[drrecovery]

You said you've tried to clone the drive with a TD2u. Does the drive get hot during the process?
Sort of sounding to me like a possible over-heating issue if it is getting extremely hot to the touch.

Not particularly hot, though I am wondering if it overheated at some point because the laptop was full of dust + had a non-working fan.

[drrecovery]

Send it to a data recovery lab?

Might be the only option, but I’m here to see if there are any other suggestions/things I may have missed that I can try first.