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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…

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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…

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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…

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[SOLVED] SD Card Recovery & Repair

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…

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[SOLVED] SanDisk Flash Drive Recovery

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…

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[FIXED] SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 (CZ80) Died

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…

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Mystery BGA-149 NAND Chip

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…

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