Data recovery customers ask me all the time: “What’s the best flash drive to get? What is the most reliable thumb drive?” They’re looking for the one perfect USB drive that will never fail, and though not all flash devices are created equal (you can bet that free goody-bag flash drive with someone’s logo printed […]
We recently completed a flash recovery case where the drive was not repairable, and a chip-off recovery was not, at first, successful. Once Clint had determined that the device was not physically repairable, it came to me to dump the memory chip to attempt a logical recovery. The controller on the device was a Chipsbank […]
We recently completed data recovery for a customer with a 32GB Lexar Jump Drive which had taken an impact while plugged into a USB port, and, as is the case with many of these Lexar flash drives, the impact flexed the circuit board enough to lift the controller (Silicon Motion SM3267L AB) and tear solder […]
There are all kinds of ways to accidentally break a USB drive – accidents happen, and these little devices can be fragile. When they take a bad hit, the most common damage is just a detached USB connector, and if you’re going to experience a broken flash drive, that’s the way you want it to […]
Lexar, along with SanDisk and PNY, is one of the more common brands of USB flash drive we see in the data recovery lab. While many flash drives that we recover suffer from either a broken connector or a bad component (which can range from a simple blown resistor to a failing NAND), we’ve known […]
This is an example of a recent recovery we did at Blizzard Data Recovery. In this case the USB flash drive had been broken in half. Some cases are just a matter of replacing the broken connector, testing for shorts or open circuits, and then recovering the data. Although that doesn’t sound too difficult we […]