cikete62 I wouldn’t go as far as saying there’s zero chance, but it’s a lot harder than it used to be, and that throws off people who are used to how things worked with old-school spinning drives. Like @HopeInSleep already said, on HDDs, you delete a file and it just sits there until something else overwrites it. You had time, sometimes a lot of time, to run recovery tools and pull it back. That’s why undelete software was so effective.
But SSDs don’t work like that. They’re designed to clean themselves up PROACTIVELY, and TRIM is part of that. It’s not just about performance either - TRIM helps with the health of the drive. Flash memory wears out over time, especially if the same blocks are reused constantly. TRIM lets the drive erase unused cells in advance and spread out future writes evenly across the storage (that’s called wear leveling). So you get better performance AND longer lifespan.
That said, if the TRIM command was never received, those deleted files might still be hanging around. Let’s say you’re using an external SSD with Windows. There’s actually a good chance TRIM isn’t happening at all. Support for TRIM over USB is hit-or-miss. Only a some percentage of external SSDs, usually ones in high-end enclosures or using UASP with proper pass-through, actually support it. Many don’t.
Another thing is, if your SSD is formatted as exFAT, TRIM won’t run the same way it does on an NTFS system drive. Windows mainly focuses TRIM on system-style file systems like NTFS/ReFS. (Microsoft’s docs say TRIM isn't used with exFAT, can read more about it here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/defrag)
Also, it is technically possible to disable TRIM completely. But I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s a reason TRIM exists, skipping it just to boost recovery odds will absolutely shorten the life of your SSD. And that decision could come back to bite you when your drive slows to a crawl or starts dropping files from wear.
So as you see, there are some cases where it’s not literally zero, but for most people, on internal SSDs with modern OS defaults, TRIM is active and recovery options drop off a cliff, that much is true.
Edit:
And by the way file system corruption on SSDs, or deleting a partition (not formatting it), usually doesn’t trigger TRIM either. So in those cases, recovery might still work.
