Devices · memory sticks and pen drives
Cards and sticks have been priced at £250 + VAT, with the free look coming ahead of it. Very little that arrives was ever meant to be relied on: either a year's worth of invoices kept nowhere else, or a single afternoon's copy that somehow ended up as the sole copy without anyone deciding it. Plugs come away from boards. Controllers stop responding. In both cases, however, the memory generally survives, and this is the point where the bench work begins. There are several coming here each week from London: site photographs that are a one-van builder's only record of the job, a thesis chapter carried home from Uxbridge, and the quotes an event hire firm in Harrow moves from booking to booking.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
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| What is going on | The usual reason for it | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| In Windows you see nothing but "Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed)" | Silence: this means the controller has stopped responding. | Stop trying other USB ports |
| This message appears on your screen: "USB device not recognized". | It cannot finish enumerating on the bus. | Try the next available port, then stop. |
| Windows wants to offer you a format before it will even allow you access to this card | A corrupt file system above intact files. | Decline the format prompt |
| At first, it mounts at 0 bytes, and then you see: "insert a disk into removable disk". | The controller can no longer access its memory. | This becomes chip-level work |
| 0x80070570 every time: Windows states that the files are corrupted and unreadable. | Damaged FAT or exFAT structures | As long as you don't write anything else to it, the data on this stick can be recovered. |
| The system says: "Windows was unable to complete the format". | The controller has stopped entirely | That refusal is working in your favour. |
As soon as your parcel arrives here, an engineer assigns a case number that same day, prior to determining what has really failed, which is the first thing done and costs you nothing. In addition to a note of what can and cannot be recovered from your drive, you will receive at the same time the fixed, written price for restoring what can be recovered. You can accept this quote, or decline it, which will result in no further obligation on your part and nothing owed to us.
With older sticks, the memory package detaches from the board and can be read independently. Monoliths surrender nothing, because there is only one solid block of resin carrying both the memory and the controller together. There is only one way in: a row of thin pads a fraction of a millimetre across.
The blocks on the die are shifted around due to wear levelling. Interleaving spreads them around over the planes to improve performance. Therefore, what a raw read returns is completely random and unorganised: software needs to take it apart layer by layer until recognisable files come out with their proper names and dates.
Before anything else, you are presented with a list of files for your review, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. All recovered data is sent to you on new media. Postage for sending it to you is prepaid by us.
You will see what has been recovered as a list first, after which a bill exists. Accepting the list means that a bill will be issued. Rejecting the list means that a bill will not be issued, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. The recovered data travels from here back to you via new media purchased specifically for your project, with the cost of postage paid by us. Your case is not resolved (i.e., "closed") until you personally view the files on a computer of your own.
Plain speaking about statistics: no failure rate for consumer flash is worth quoting. Sticks are not deployed in fleets; spinning disks are what data centres count; therefore no such numbers were ever gathered to describe them. What we can honestly describe is the pattern of damage at this bench, which repeats over and over again: physical faults are almost always due to a connector which has left the board of the stick, and the sticks that simply stop are usually either unbadged or freebies given out at trade stands.
A stick pressed into the floor of a site office. On it: seven years of invoices, the CIS records, and a tax return due within days. Its connector had broken off from the board, and because a monolith offers nothing to plug into, the pinout of the controller was determined and the files were extracted directly from its test pads. The return still went in with days to spare.
Rarely. All that shell ever has on it is contacts. The files are stored in the memory package located behind the shell. In most cases, when a stick is split into two parts, it can still be read. The real concern then becomes whether or not the package and its resin were damaged in the break.
No. The problem is with the controller, which quit responding, not with the memory underneath. Once the memory is accessed directly, whatever the controller believes doesn't matter any more.
Weak NAND flash (the memory) sitting behind an equally weak controller. Some go further still: they misrepresent themselves by claiming they are larger than they really are. The chip works perfectly until you write data beyond what actually exists physically. This makes them fine for carrying films between machines. But it would never make sense to use these types of chips as the sole copy of something.
There is just one type of damage we cannot deal with: a memory die that's been cleaved completely through. Stopped controllers, boards in three separate pieces, and mapping tables that contain garbage: all those things occur frequently enough here that we wouldn't classify them as unusual.
It doesn't cost you anything for us to look at it. All we do is give you a breakdown of what opened and what did not, plus a single fixed price to complete, written down before you agree to let us continue. On most jobs, you only pay if we recover your data. Please don't turn on the drive until you get that breakdown.