Could you please explain why there would be recovery options for spinning hard drives as opposed solid state?
He oversimplifying it and vague about what he means.
Out of three scenarios I'll mention, he's probably referring to the last one.
For commercial data recovery from a defective device...
Recovery from spinning platters is much more understood. There's typically no encryption. The most renown recovery companies have contacts with hard drive manufacturers in which they're given design documents to the drives of every generation or to engineers who can assist. The general design of these drives also do not vary much from generation to generation. Experience is high.
SSDs on the other hand, change significantly between manufacturer and generation. Data formats on-chip are heavily tied to the firmware that wrote them. Some, like Sandforce, use encryption on the fly, so dumping the chips for analysis may get you nothing useful without understanding both the compression scheme, the encryption, and some way of extracting the key.
Others change from MLC to TLC NAND, which requires entirely different error correction methods because of the magnitude difference in reliability. Some data recovery companies do have partnerships with manufacturers, but it's rare, and much more expensive.
For somebody trying to do recovery at home using tools like photorec/testdisk/etc:
With a spinning platter, if it reads most of it and has unrecoverable sectors in some area, you'll be able to get most of the data back using just tools downloadable from the web for free or minimal cost. You can still plug it in, and most dying disks will still give you some chance to read some of it.
With SSDs, when their firmware crashes or the NAND is at their end of life, most will NOT enter a read-only mode. They'll simply brick themselves. Sad but true. In most of these cases, they'll be working fine one day, and then all of a sudden disappear on you, and then it's over.
The only drive I've seen which actually did enter read-only mode once it's dead uses the notorious JMicron 601 controller (the one with all the stutter problems). Everything else I've seen die, just dies.
Finally, file recovery from a good drive/SSD, but the problem is that somebody deleted a file that you want back:
If the platter disk is fine, but somebody deleted a few files, it depends on if they simply deleted it or overwrote it. (delete just removes the markers telling the file system it's there, the data hasn't actually been overwritten) Tools can recover from that sometimes. (see testdisk/photorec)
If the SSD is actually fine, and somebody deleted a few files you wish they didn't, then you better hope you don't have TRIM enabled. Because if you do, TRIM will do its job and wipe the entire file off disk with no hope of recovery of that file. Not even the manufacturer's top engineers nor the NSA will be able to get it back (unless TRIM is broken on that firmware).
