January 6th, 2010 by Jeremy Brock

In the last few months we’ve seen an increase in 8GByte NAND memory chips with an abnormally high amount of bit errors. These memory chips are primarily manufactured by Micron and Intel with the model numbers (Micron) 29F64G08CFAAA and (Intel) 29F64G08FAMCI. These NAND chips are primary used in flash devices (SSD Hard Drives, USB Flash Drives, CompactFlash Cards, and Secure Digital (SD) Cards) that are 8GBytes or larger.

These NAND chips use 3-Bit MLC which allows NAND manufactures to store more data in each cell at the expense of endurance (reliability). These NAND chips are typically cheaper than their MLC & SLC counterparts which allows for inexpensive, high density (capacity) flash devices. All NAND flash chips develop bit/wear damage (bits randomly change values when read). Sectors in SLC memory typically fail after 100K writes, sectors in MLC memory typically fail after 1K writes, however sectors in 3-Bit MLC memory appear to fail after only 10 writes.

August 8, 2009 by Jeremy Brock

Demand for Solid State Drives (SSD) has grown in 2009 thanks to inexpensive controllers, and low cost high density MLC NAND memory chips. As one of the few data recovery shops specializing in NAND data recovery we’re often asked for our opinion on SSD hard drives. SSD is a relatively new and untested technology, aside from sparse manufacture documentation there isn’t much low level information on the internal design or reliability of these drives. JMicron has emerged as a leader in low cost SSD drives, their JMF602 controller is found in many SSD drives.