New Moulded Flash Devices Information
April 28, 2010 by admin
Recently various failed SD Memory Cards and USB Memory Sticks have been sent for recovery to VenSys where we have been unable to recover any information from the failed device.
This is, unfortunately, due to advances in flash based technology that have seen the previous PCB (Printed Circuit Board) with removable components and chips replaced by all of these relevant parts molded into a monolithic type board. This board will contain the connector, controller, data flash chip and components all encased into a hard resign. (See picture attached) 
Current recovery techniques require the ability to remove the flash NAND chips in order to make the required RAW scans and then commence the decoding of that scan in order to return the usable data to the customer These new devices of course prevent this from being so.
The good news is that there are occasions when these devices are recoverded in full.
This is where the flash NAND chip, that contains your data, develops bad areas. We can recover information by imaging the chip which recovers the data by “completing” or “reading” these bad areas ensuring that no blocks remain unread ensuring that the data can be read / accessed. This process is something that can’t be done by simply inserting the chip into a USB port or card reader.
In general however we would advise not to use these products for the forseeable future as at present the technology doesn’t exist to recover these devices with failed controllers – which probably accounts for 75-80% of the failure type of these new molded devices.