Devices · memory sticks and pen drives
Cards and sticks are priced at £250 + VAT, with the free look ahead of it. Almost nothing that arrives was ever meant to be relied on: a year of invoices kept nowhere else, or one afternoon's copy that became, without anyone deciding it, the only one. Plugs part company with boards. Controllers stop replying. Through both of those the memory generally survives, which is where the bench work starts. Several land here from London weekly — site photographs that are a one-van builder's only record of the job, a thesis chapter carried home from Uxbridge, 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Windows shows nothing but Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | Silence: the controller is no longer replying | Stop trying other USB ports |
| It says: USB device not recognized | It never finishes enumerating on the bus | One more port, and then stop |
| Windows offers a format before it will open it | A damaged file system over undamaged files | Decline the format prompt |
| Mounts at 0 bytes, then: insert a disk into removable disk | The memory is no longer visible to its controller | This becomes chip-level work |
| 0x80070570 every time — Windows says corrupted and unreadable | Damaged FAT or exFAT structures | Recoverable, so long as nothing further is written |
| The message: Windows was unable to complete the format | The controller has stopped entirely | That refusal works in your favour |
A case number goes on it the day the parcel lands, and an engineer settles what has truly failed before anything else happens — free of charge, and first in the order of work. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
Older sticks give up their memory package: it comes off the board and reads on its own. A monolith gives up nothing, because one lump of resin carries memory and controller together, and the only entrance is a row of pads a fraction of a millimetre across.
Blocks are shifted around the die by wear levelling; interleaving scatters them over the planes to gain speed. What a raw read returns is therefore in no order at all, and software takes it apart layer by layer until files with proper names and proper dates come out.
Before anything else you get the file list. Nothing is invoiced until you have accepted it, and everything recovered goes home on fresh media, postage paid at this end.
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge whatever. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have read those files on a machine of your own.
Plain speaking about statistics: no failure rate for consumer flash is worth quoting. Sticks are not run in fleets, data centres count spinning disks, and the numbers were therefore never gathered. What can be described honestly is the pattern on this bench, which repeats: physical faults are overwhelmingly a connector that has left its board, and the sticks that simply stop are usually unbadged, or something handed out free at a trade stand.
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 left the board, and since a monolith offers nothing to plug into, the pinout of the controller was established and the data lifted directly off its test pads. The return still went in with days to spare.
Rarely. Contacts are all that shell ever carried, and the files are held in the memory package behind it. Split in two, a stick will usually still read; the real question is how the package and its resin fared in the break.
No. It is the controller that stopped answering, not the memory underneath. Once that memory is reached directly, what the controller thinks stops mattering at all.
Weak NAND behind a weak controller. Some go further still and lie about their own size: a small die dressed as a large one, flawless right up to the point where you write past what is physically there. Fine for carrying a film between machines. Not fine as the only copy of anything.
Only one: a memory die broken clean across. Controllers that have stopped, boards in three separate pieces, mapping tables that read as nonsense — none of that is unusual here.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the drive switched off.