Oven baking SSDs does work!
Okay, long winded post, so TLDR: I baked my Sandisk NVMe 1TB SSD for 8 minutes at 200 degrees Celcius (from cold oven) and it sprung back to life, from not being detected by BIOS or Windows.
For all you who appreciate a bit more detail. I have a Dell XPS15 which I upgraded a couple of years ago with a new SanDisk SSD Extreme PRO, 1 TB, M.2 NVMe 3D. I've used it without issue since then, but a couple of days ago after I came home from a trip with the laptop I get the dreaded message on startup that no harddrive was found. Regardless of how many reboots I tried it didn't work. I threw in my old SSD which I kept just in case and the computer started up no problem to a two year old desktop background. I throw the presumably broken SSD into a USB enclosure and connect it and it shows up as a drive, but with 0 byte capacity and a prompt to insert media when you try to open it.
Okay, so what now. Am I completely out of luck? I do make backups, and as an avid video producer I have a lot of material on the drive. I wouldn't lose too much, a few weeks of material, most of which could be recovered from other sources. It would be a hassle, but not the end of the world, and not worth spending the mountains of cash for paid data recovery.
So my option turned to Googling and I found lots of information on baking graphics cards and SSDs in regular household ovens to reflow the solder. Surely, it can't be that simple!? I saw a lot of cases where it just didn't work, and a lot of people who had luck with it. I wasn't just going to throw my drive into the oven willy nilly, I needed a bit more control of the situation.
I went out and bought an analogue ambient (not a probe) oven thermometer and a silicone lid from IKEA. I first did a dry run in the oven, checking that the silicone could take the temperature and be able to use the thermometer to adjust for any discrepancies between the heat adjuster and the actual temperature. The "recipes" I found online varied from 190C (375F) to 250C (475F), but pretty much all stated that 8 minutes was the golden time, and definitely do not bake for more than 10 minutes or you risk damage. This was a problem, because during my dry run the oven thermometer barely rose above 100 degrees Celcius in 8 minutes, and took a full 16 minutes until it reached 200 degrees. So the question is, do I leave it in for 8 minutes, even though the temperature won't be hot enough to reflow solder, or do I leave it in longer to make sure the solder reflows but risk damage to my drive?
I figure caution is the name of the game, if the lower temperature 8 minute run fails I could just bake it again.
So, I plop a level into the oven first to adjust so the pan I put everything on sits absolutely level. I put the silicone lid on top of that and the drive facing up on top of the lid. I put the oven thermometer next to them and I close the oven. I start from a cold oven, and I crank up the temperature to 200C, tell Siri to "Set an 8 minute timer!" and I sit with baited breath staring into the oven.
And I wait.
And I wait.
The alarm goes off, the temperature is again barely 110 degrees C. Surely this is way below what's needed, but 8 minutes is 8 minutes, so I turn the oven off, open the oven door a crack and let the oven slowly cool down. The starting from a cold oven and letting the oven cool down before you touch anything is to prevent thermal shock to the drive.
I wait 30 minutes, the oven thermometer is slowly dropping, when it reaches somewhere around 30 degrees I figure that's good enough. It's almost ambient temperature. I take the drive out, plop it into my laptop, and turn it on.
The Dell logo appears.
The Dell logo hangs in there for an unusually long time.
The Windows login screen appears!
THE WINDOWS LOGIN SCREEN APPEARS!
Holy 🤯!!!!!!11
I cannot believe this worked, and I cannot explain why it did work. The temperature can't have been hot enough, surely? But I'm staring at all my files, there is nothing amiss at all.
Of course at this point I scurry for an external hard drive and I start running backups like a man possessed. Everything has been backed up, and I have also made a full mirror of the drive that I can drop on a new SSD when it has been delivered.
That's my story, but obviously I would advise caution. If you can afford it and if your data is important enough don't throw your drive into the oven. Go to a reputable data recovery place instead. For now though, MacGyver wins the day!
Anyone else had luck with this process?