Drive is mostly zeros
Posted: June 21st, 2023, 16:07
Is it common or even possible for a SSD controller to fail in a way that it just reports zeros when reading some parts of the drive?
That is a possibility I am considering given a customer who presented the following issue:
A large Samsung 4TB USB external SSD drive which had approximately 50% usage comprised of jpg files.
I imaged the drive with no errors.
R-Studio found less than a dozen jpg files.
I scanned the disk image byte-by-byte and found that > 99% of all bytes were '\0'.
I told the customer that something had to have written over their data.
They insisted that it was not possible and additionally when I asked them further questions they said that all of their files were there one moment and then gone the next.
They claim that there was not enough time to overwrite data.
Puzzling.
That is a possibility I am considering given a customer who presented the following issue:
A large Samsung 4TB USB external SSD drive which had approximately 50% usage comprised of jpg files.
I imaged the drive with no errors.
R-Studio found less than a dozen jpg files.
I scanned the disk image byte-by-byte and found that > 99% of all bytes were '\0'.
I told the customer that something had to have written over their data.
They insisted that it was not possible and additionally when I asked them further questions they said that all of their files were there one moment and then gone the next.
They claim that there was not enough time to overwrite data.
Puzzling.
