A method of restoring user data in a modular solid-state drive including memory channels coupled to respective ones of non-volatile memory cards, the method including: upon physical replacement of a defunct memory card of the non-volatile memory cards with a new non-volatile memory card, and power on of the modular solid-state drive, retrieving a firmware segment and a system segment of the modular solid-state drive from unaffected memory channels of the memory channels not coupled to the new non-volatile memory card; rebuilding a firmware of the modular solid-state drive based on the retrieved firmware segment; rebuilding a data mapping table associated with the non-volatile memory cards based on the retrieved system segment; and restoring full integrity of the user data originally stored on the non-volatile memory cards based on the rebuilt data mapping table and data from the unaffected memory channels.