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…
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…
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…
If your SD card is no longer functional you need to send it to a data recovery company. Here are some common faults to look at before trying to fix or repair your damaged SD card. With the exception of…
If your flash drive is no longer functional you need to send it to a data recovery company. Here are some common diagnostic tips for SanDisk Cruzer failures including broken connectors, damaged components, and firmware corruption. SanDisk flash drives are…
Many older SanDisk flash drives have two common faults that account for 90% of failures (aside from broken connectors / PCB damage) including the dreaded “endless blinking light” fault. The 20-99-00092-2 & 20-99-00121-1 controller PCB’s are interchangeable however there are…
We received an unresponsive SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 (CZ80) flash drive that heats up when plugged into a computer. The computer didn’t recognize the flash drive and the LED didn’t blink. After opening the SanDisk flash drive and diagnosing the…
The short answer is you can't, here's why. Assuming you've taken your flash drive to another computer and ruled out a computer issue your flash drive has a serious internal problem. Generally, it boils down to two possible problems. Flash…
We have seen a few of these BGA-149 NAND chips in Verbatim flash drives from China. At first, they look like eMMC chips but they are actually custom NAND chips. Toshiba’s marketing material says they’re BGA-153 and intended for “high…
Even if a monolthic flash device isn't visibly cracked there can still be internal damage. In electronics, all connected wires have a path to ground, using a multimeter we can measure voltage drop in diode mode to get a rough idea…