Liquid / spill damage
Summary
A liquid spill or submersion in liquid has rendered your hard drive or SSD inoperable.
The Situation
It’s very common for us to encounter drives, and especially laptops and MacBooks where a drink has been spilled onto and into the computer, damaging the drive and/or computer. With many modern MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs the SSD happens to reside right below a vent that liquid often finds its way into, and they also reside in the lowest part of the MacBook hull such that the liquid pools up there first if trickling in from places, even other than the vent.
The Good News
IT Data Recovery has successfully recovered data from hundreds of liquid-damaged hard drives and solid state drives. Sometimes, they’re not damaged too badly. With hard drives, often the liquid hasn’t penetrated and leaked into the drive’s platter area yet, unless the drive was submerged. If the liquid hasn’t reached the platters yet, these recoveries often only require electronic repair to the circuit boards for successful data recovery, but even with submerged drives, we are still often successful, though those are much more difficult. With Solid State Drives subjected to liquid damage, often we can clean up the board and replace the obviously-damaged or blown chips and regain access to the data for successful SSD data recovery.
The Solution
If your drive has been subjected to liquid damage, time is of the essence. We recommend ignoring all the magic rice fixes you’ll find on the net. The faith people place in those is kind of silly, even if sometimes you may get lucky by drying the drive out. We think removing the drive and putting a fan on it is a better option than rice if you wish to go DIY route. If your data is important, however, we have much better ways of dealing with the damage, and a drive that’s been subjected to liquid damage often will degrade and begin to corrode very quickly. The sooner you get your liquid-damaged drive into the pros, the greater the chances will be for successful recovery.