Lexar S50 (AU6998AN) Data Recovery
Here we have an 8GB Lexar S50 Flash Drive. These came in a flip top package usually sold as a pair of two or three with different colors. It uses an Alcor Micro AU6998AN Controller and came in 8, 16,…
SanDisk SDCZ48 / SDCZ50 / SDCZ60 Broken Connector
Here we have a SanDisk 16GB SDCZ60 Series Cruzer Glide flash drive that came in with a broken USB connector — a very common failure on this generation of SanDisk drives. The SDCZ48, SDCZ50, and SDCZ60 all share the same…
Reballing LGA-152 NAND Chips
Often, we have to reball LGA-152 NAND chips to swap them from one PCB to another. For example, from a bad circuit board to a donor circuit board. This is an example reballing a Micron NW657 NAND Chip with 0.40mm…
Repair Broken SanDisk Cruzer Connectors
If you don’t know how to fix it yourself you can send the flash drive in for data recovery. We offer competitive pricing and FREE shipping anywhere within the United States. Simply fill out a work order and mail the…
Monolithic Flash Drive Recovery – Solving Difficult Cases
Newer monolithic flash drives are proving more difficult to recover than ever. One reason is due to multiple duplicate copper traces used to fish signals from the controller down to the NAND flash memory chip. I’ve found the best way…
Hidden Hynix DDR Enable Command
While sniffing traffic on a Hynix NAND chip (H27Q1T08EM6R ID: ad 3c 19 a3) we found a hidden command to change the read mode from NON-DDR to DDR which effectively doubles the read throughput of the chip. Cmd 0xEF Addr…
Monolithic Flash Drive Recovery – A Basic How To
Ever wondered what goes into solving a monolithic data recovery case? Here is a brief explanation of what we do to recover data from monolithic flash drives.
Micro-Soldering Example
We recently received a USB flash drive with missing legs on the controller microchip. Rather than source an identical chip or go the off-chip route we decided to fix it by removing a small portion of the silicon substrate and…
How to tell if you have a monolithic flash drive
Monolithic flash drives are similar to traditional flash drives in structure, however, their components are encased in a ceramic case preventing easy access to the NAND flash memory chip storing its data. Monolithic flash drives are cheaper to assemble, more…
How Flash Drives Fail
Updated for 2018: Flash media is very robust but it can fail. Flash drives are like mini computers, they have a controller which has a CPU, RAM, EEPROM, and GPIO embedded in it. When the flash drive is inserted the…