Repairing Dead Flash Drives

[Chuckt]

Backups are important to me and after having a few CD's go bad on me, I've been a fan of flash drives. I've had them accidentally go through the washer and dryer a few times and I've left one on the hot seat of a car. They all work except for my first one which was a 128 MB flash drive by Lexar that I bought on sale.

I saw this article on Hackaday about fixing flash drives:

http://hackaday.com/2013/11/27/repairin ... sh-drives/

The actual article is here:

http://infar.be/index.php?/archives/100 ... l#extended

And the program they use on dead flash drives is chip genius:

http://usb-fix.blogspot.de/

I'm guessing that crystals don't have the same life as flash memory and may be the weakest link in a flash drive. Will they survive 10 years?

In any event, I'm guessing I have to have skills in surface mount soldering and chip identification to go any further.

The best advice is not to drop your flash drives so the crystal doesn't crack.

[brad]

Very handy Chuck,

I have a dead SD card with some files on it I'd like to get off.

Perhaps There may be a small dmd crystal on there also?

[Chuckt]

Try the chip genius program on the card first.

If you can get the card open without breaking anything. I heard that we're never to squeeze the card especially on the flat surface (horizontally). Some of the newer thumbdrives seem to be in realy tiny packages. You could always experiment on a blank empty card to see what you are in for. This is one of those things I have not tried before.

[Chuckt]

http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/sd-card-shell.html

I found some empty SD card shells on the web. Now I know they exist for customers if they get broken.

[Chuckt]

http://dx.com/p/sandisk-tf-adapter-repl ... -pack-8463

This site is more reasonable but it seems it is an adapter.

[Chuckt]

There are soke videos on youtube on how to open an sd card. Maybe when I have more time I can find a good video.

[brad]

I remember opening an older SD card and it had a very thin PCB with chips on it.

These days I think they just make it all into one substrate I.E. the chip itself is the PCB.

My broken one is an old 128MB version so I dare say it actually has the PCB with components on it.

[Chuckt]

I opened one of the original 128 MB Lexar flash drives and a chip fell out. Either the solder paste disintegrated or they just pressed it together and hoped the case would hold the chip against the contacts.

I had copied the data when the drive started malfunctioning and it never worked again so I took the loss since I had already got the data off.

[brad]

I remember seeing someone buy one on ebay years ago when they first came out and it didn't work, he opened it up and all that was inside was the USB connector - there was no circuit board or anything!

[bitfogav]

Yes that was true Brad when they first came out, ive seen the same sort of thing too. ive also seen usb sticks that look like the real thing and when plugged into the PC it reads has a usb stick with correct gigabyte etc but when you try to upload to it nothing happens.. all it is a IC that simulates a usb stick.. people will do anything these days!.

fakeusb.png (68 KiB) Viewed 12885 times

[Chuckt]

The laws governing warranties in my country may be different than your country. They don't warranty my flash drives very long. One company does talk in their literature about how you could erase flash memory for years and how their flash memory is long lasting (maybe 21 years). I looked at the warranty and asked myself if flash memory is good for a decade or more, why don't they warranty it for that long? The answer is: It must be the crystal that won't outlive the memory.