Here is a random look at some data recovery cases from the week of July 30th 2017.
At Blizzard we always try to perform a temporary repair on broken USB flash devices before we resort to chip-off recovery. We replace the connectors, check under a microscope for cracked solder joints, lifted TSOP48 pins, blown littelfuse or resistors, etc. It’s only when a problem like a bad controller or snapped PCB presents itself that we rely on chip-off recovery. I estimate that only 1 in 5 of our recoveries cannot be repaired and requires removal of the NAND chip(s). Here you see a USB device with an SM3253L AE controller and 2 NAND chips that we recovered by removing the chips.
Next up we have a 3TB Western Digital WD30EZRX that was quoted extremely high by another data recovery shop but we saved the customer some serious $$. We do our best to make hard drive recovery affordable for personal users and small business owners.
We also took the time to work with some new tools. Head swaps on the Seagate Rosewood mobile hard drives ST1000LM035 and ST2000LM007 just became easier thanks to new tools form HDD Surgery.
We knew the previous week was just too good to be true, plenty of repaired flash devices and not one chip-off required. But not this week. We had multiple devices that required chip-off recovery. All cases were a success.
We also worked on some older EIDE (PATA) hard drives this week. A Maxtor 8.4GB from 1999. Yes, you read that right. The other PATA HDD was a Seagate ST3160023A 160GB model. We still receive a number of old hard drives that need recovery. You should always back up important data because new devices get broken or fail, but storing data on old devices without a backup just seems like an even greater risk. Don’t take that risk!
And one more pick for this week… An HP 128GB flash device came in that had failed. Old or new, small or large, any storage device can fail. Even this pricey USB 3.0 128GB from HP with flash controller IS903.
Well there you have it, a random sample of a week at the DR lab. This was fun, let’s do it again 🙂