Devices · flash drives & USB sticks
Nobody sets out to trust a flash drive with anything important. It ends up carrying it regardless — a year of invoices held nowhere else, or a temporary copy that quietly became the only one. Connectors give way. Controllers go silent. In both cases the memory itself has usually come through fine, and that is the part we go to first. A few reach the bench from Plymouth every week.
You will be talking to an engineer
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| What shows up | What that points to | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Device Manager lists it as Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | No response of any kind. The controller has given up | Stop working through ports |
| USB device not recognized | Enumeration never finishes | One more port, then leave it |
| A prompt to format the disk before use | The filesystem is broken; the files are not | Decline the offer to format it |
| 0 bytes, and the prompt: Please insert a disk into removable disk | The controller can no longer see its memory | Chip-level work needed |
| 0x80070570 when opening — file or directory corrupted and unreadable | The FAT or exFAT structures took damage | Recoverable, so long as nothing more is written |
| Windows was unable to complete the format | The controller has stopped for good | That refusal is in your interest |
Whatever arrives is booked in under a case number on the day it reaches the bench. An engineer then works out the actual fault, and that part is free. You get a plain answer on what can come off the drive and what cannot, followed by one price in writing. Nothing further happens until you have read it and agreed.
On an older drive the memory package lifts off the board and gets read by itself. Nothing lifts off a monolith: memory and controller are cast into one lump. The route in is a row of test pads, none of them wider than a fraction of a millimetre.
Wear levelling shuffles blocks around the die. Interleaving spreads them across planes for speed. A raw read carries all of that mixed together, and it is taken apart in software one layer at a time, until named files with proper dates appear again.
The list of files reaches you first. Nothing is billed before you accept it, and everything returns on new media.
Thinking it over costs you nothing. Everything the drive gave up is listed for you before any invoice exists, and the bill only follows your go-ahead. Files travel back on media bought in for your job, with return carriage paid at this end, and the case stays on the bench until you confirm they open on your own computer.
Straight talk about the numbers: nobody has ever published a consumer-flash failure rate worth repeating. These are not run in fleets, and no data centre tracks them the way it tracks its disks, so the evidence was never gathered at all. What passes across this bench is a narrow sample, and it repeats itself every year: almost all physical damage is a connector that has come away, and the drives that stop dead without warning are usually unbranded, or handed out free at a trade show.
Someone trod on it on the floor of a site office, and the connector came away from the board. Seven years of invoices sat on that stick, the CIS records beside them, and a tax return was due in. A monolith offers no socket to work through, so the pinout of the controller was traced and the read lifted off the test pads. The return was filed on the day.
Rarely. That shell does nothing but carry contacts; the files live in the memory package sitting behind it. A drive that has come apart in two will usually still read, so long as the package and the moulding round it are not cracked.
No. The controller stopped answering; the memory beneath it never did. Read that memory directly and what the controller thinks no longer counts.
Poor memory, with a poor controller managing it. A few are also lying about capacity — a small die reported as a large one, working perfectly until you fill it past the point where real memory runs out. Good enough to move a film between machines. Never good enough to be the only copy.
One case only: a memory die split right through. Controllers that have died, a board broken into pieces, mapping tables in a mess — those make up a normal week.
The diagnosis is free, and it comes back as a list: which files read, which do not, and what getting them off would take. Until then, leave the drive unplugged.