How to use SSDs?

We recently received some SSD drives for recovery.

First case: A customer with a 1 TB drive with many projects. At some point his computer freezes. He restarts the computer. Turns out a 100GB folder containing important data has gone missing. A scan for the data yields nothing, not even in RAW mode. Conclusion: The data has been deleted!

Second case: An SSD with sandforce processor. Every time you try to access the SSD, the drive remains in "busy mode" and cannot be accessed in any way. The data is encrypted, so removing the memory chips is not an option. Conclusion: Although the data is still available, there is no way to get to it!

Third case: This happened to a foreign colleague. He's cloning an SSD. Suddenly the disk hangs. He restarts them. Suddenly the disk appears empty. Nothing at all anymore. Conclusion: The data has been deleted!

Fourth case: An SSD that has been left aside for several months (just in a cupboard) appears to have lost 88% of its data when reconnected. Conclusion: Some SSD models use memory chips that lose their contents when they are not powered.

Culprit: In cases 1 and 3 the trim command is the culprit

Advantage of Trim: This "Feature" of most SSDs clears the memory when the PC indicates that this space is no longer in use. This allows the SSD to store new data faster.

Disadvantage of Trim: If you accidentally delete a folder, there is no way to retrieve the data. Even if this happens due to an error in the operating system as in case 1.

Don't get me wrong. SSD drives are fast and a pleasure to equip your PC or Mac with, but because of that speed they can also erase your data in the blink of an eye! Where a normal hard disk would need about an hour to transfer 100 GB of data, an SSD only needs a few milliseconds.

My advice: Use an SSD purely to set up your operating system and use a regular hard disk to store the data.

For archiving: Never use an SSD, but always use a regular hard disk.

Final advice: Always make a copy; no hard drive is 100% secure.