dead USB drive anyone?

The only USB HDD I have any experience with is a USB external - it came with a special Y cable with 2 plugs so it could pick up enough current. Only 1 plug has signal lines.

Not tried it myself - but someone on a forum was complaining they had to clonk the drive on the desk to get it to spin up. They were using a normal single plug lead.

frank wrote on 6/22/2017 7:47 AM:

Just to be sure, you are talking about a USB Flash drive, right? I've yet to find one I couldn't open. It would cost them extra money to make them hard to open, solid plastic.

Not sure what you might be able to fix inside other than a failed solder joint though. Mostly they are a single Flash chip with a built in controller, nothing to replace without losing the data in the chip.

The lesson here is that Flash chips are not terribly reliable for long term storage. Anything on a Flash drive should be backed up on another Flash drive or your computer hard drive or both. Backup, backup, backup.

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A good buddy of mine had some data and pictures on a flash drive that he co uld no longer read on his computer or any recovery software. So I opened i t up looking for bad solder on the chip or a problem with the USB connector . Sure, the plastic outer case opened up easily enough but there was nothi ng inside. That's right, nothing.. Other than a two piece outer plastic ca se, the drive was a USB connector soldered to a multi-layer board with no e xternal components on it. Whatever it used for a chip was embedded inside t he PC layer.

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I have a library of .bin files for TV mainboards on 4 thumb drives as well as three PCs I own and several PC from others in the business. Too many ye ars removing soldered-in eeproms and reading them to lose them to a balky f lash drive.

Was there a black blob on the board? That would be epoxy covering the die mounted to the board. I see that on high volume, low cost products which only need one or two chips. Actually mounting chips inside the PCB is not something I've ever seen or heard of before. Not saying it's impossible, but it would be done for low cost and I don't think it would be any cheaper than the epoxy blob and in fact may be slightly more expensive.

Flash memory inherently wears out. It also has issues being made. To deal with both problems the chips are made with extra capacity and error correcting codes are used to find and correct errors. When a sector is found to have errors, the data is copied over to a spare block and the old one is marked as bad. The problem comes when there are too many errors to read the data on a failing block or when all the spare blocks are used. This makes SSD storage susceptible to sudden failure.

Yes, they may not go back together afterwards, but they are always easy to open. And they may not be so pocketable once opened, but they don't really need the case to use, just to protect the circuits when sitting around. And if there is a failure, it's not like the thing will be trusted again, the best that opening can do is show a bad connection that can be resoldered, and then you rescue the data and abandon the device.

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e could no longer read on his computer or any recovery software. So I open ed it up looking for bad solder on the chip or a problem with the USB conne ctor. Sure, the plastic outer case opened up easily enough but there was n othing inside. That's right, nothing.. Other than a two piece outer plasti c case, the drive was a USB connector soldered to a multi-layer board with no external components on it. Whatever it used for a chip was embedded insi de the PC layer.

Absolutely not. I know what an IC printed on a PC and covered with epoxy l ooks like (most modern consumer electronics remotes have them).

This was a multi layer board with no exposed lands save for the USB connect ions. The rest of the board was green mask with no place for any parts to be soldered to. If he still has it I'll take a pic and upload it.

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A couple of years ago a coworker had a flash drive from his daughter that h ad research material for her doctoral work and she was very upset. I plugge d it into my machine and it was indeed dead. I flexed it a little and got t he Windows beep for USB. She had flexed it in the side of the laptop while using it in bed and cracked the solder connection(s) in the drive. I just s tressed it while it copied off the data to the hard drive and copied on to a new flash drive. I never found out if there was any damage to the laptop but she was very happy to get her data back. I think she learned a lesson a bout backups.

If it's a 'portable' drive particularly with those wide USB 3.0 cables, I'v e seen those break too often but are easily available.

I'm no fan of the typical USB connection for flash drives in laptops. It is far too easy to damage both the drive and the PC. I often use a short USB extension cable for plugging in a flash stick. But that still leaves the laptop connector vulnerable as the typical USB connector still creates are pretty big lever arm. I don't even like the "micro" size mouse dongles. I had a laptop bag ripped from putting the laptop in it with the dongle installed. The tear ended up running and destroyed the whole bag.

And now, they're even talking about after saving something on a device, open it back up and save it to the cloud for extra backup, too.