SSD Went from Working to Unbootable to Unreadable

[HD137]

I have a Patriot Pyro SSD I was using as the boot drive for a home PC running Windows 10. It had a recurring issue where it would fail to boot and the BIOS would recognize the controller as a SandForce 2000 SATA controller, but would read the drive capacity as 0.0 GB.

 

Typically it would boot after a hard, PSU-off reboot, so I wasn't sure if the issue was with the SSD, motherboard, cables, etc. But, after it recurred most recently, and wouldn't boot no matter what I tried, I decided to just replace the drive.

 

I plugged it into an external SATA to USB 3 enclosure and was able to read it and grab some important files off of it using a separate computer. I then went out to get a new drive and came back to find that it was no longer being recognized at all.

 

Disk Management shows it as not initialized with no recognized space.

 

Is there any hope of recovering more data off of it or cloning it to the new drive?

[HD137]

Well, in what I can describe only as the dumbest solution I could think of, throwing the failing drive into the freezer for a few minutes has rendered it readable again. Currently undergoing the cloning process.

[SPARTAN VI]

Another one bites the sand(force). 

[cafe]

freezer...

[Murasaki]

And you think baking gpus was funny, freezing ssds is in the neightbourhood.

[HD137]

Issue is now, finally, mostly resolved. Drive was successfully (?) cloned while sitting between two bags of ice to keep it cool, but Windows failed to boot when the cloned drive was inserted. Could not repair or restore the install, so performed a fresh install on the new drive. Few other issues I ran into along the way if anyone is reading this for posterity:

 

1. Cloning the drive resulted in a GPT style partition, which meant that Windows couldn't be installed, even after the main partition was formatted. Had to return the drive to out-of-the-box style fully unallocated space, which required using Windows' DISKPART command line utility as the Disk Management utility couldn't delete certain protected partitions that the cloning had created
2. Even with fully unallocated space, having another SATA drive (HDD) connected prevented Windows from installing with an unhelpful "Could not install Windows on the selected location" message. Removing the secondary HDD allowed for install.
3. Incidental, but with the fresh Windows install, my PCIe Wireless Adapter (TP-Link T6E) wasn't initially recognized. USB tethering to my phone allowed for an internet connection and download of the drivers necessary.