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brooksmosesI tend to be very fond of the YouTube channels where someone who is very competent at their craft is showing and explaining how they do their work -- and, it seems, so are many other people since there are quite a number of YouTube channels doing this sort of thing.
An interesting one that I discovered today is HDD Recovery Services. He's a Canadian that does data recovery on hard disks, USB flash drives, memory cards, and related sorts of things. It's pretty clear that he's been doing it a while -- one recent video involved a flash drive that someone sent him four years ago. At the time the technology wasn't there to recover the data, and the customer suggested he hang onto the broken drive for a while and see how the technology improved. A few months ago, with newer and better tools and skills, he was able to recover it.
The skills that he uses to recover the data from flash drives and memory cards are particularly fascinating to watch. Usually he's removing the memory chips and resoldering them, often with soldering jumper wires on the boards to fix broken traces or even bridge across broken boards. (Drop your laptop with a critical USB flash drive in the port, and snap it in half? Most likely he can recover the data.) All this is generally done under a microscope, but otherwise just doing things by hand with relatively simple tools, and making it all look easy -- including things like resoldering ball-grid-array memory chips, which is very much expert-grade work.
Along the way, he's talking about some of the ways that these devices are made. A typical flash drive has a small controller chip that has the logic, and one or more large memory chips that store the data. There are also "monolithic" chips that do both. Sometimes some of the smaller circuit boards with monolithic chips on them will have solder pads on the bottom of the board that connect directly to the memory part of the chip, bypassing the controller part. Why? Well, sometimes the controller parts don't work but the memory parts do, so they take those broken boards and solder them to a slightly larger board with another controller chip on it -- and that's where a lot of the really cheap USB flash drives come from, and why they're so cheap.
Anyway, I found his work very interesting, and also pleasantly relaxing to watch. So, if you're into that sort of thing, I recommend it.
An interesting one that I discovered today is HDD Recovery Services. He's a Canadian that does data recovery on hard disks, USB flash drives, memory cards, and related sorts of things. It's pretty clear that he's been doing it a while -- one recent video involved a flash drive that someone sent him four years ago. At the time the technology wasn't there to recover the data, and the customer suggested he hang onto the broken drive for a while and see how the technology improved. A few months ago, with newer and better tools and skills, he was able to recover it.
The skills that he uses to recover the data from flash drives and memory cards are particularly fascinating to watch. Usually he's removing the memory chips and resoldering them, often with soldering jumper wires on the boards to fix broken traces or even bridge across broken boards. (Drop your laptop with a critical USB flash drive in the port, and snap it in half? Most likely he can recover the data.) All this is generally done under a microscope, but otherwise just doing things by hand with relatively simple tools, and making it all look easy -- including things like resoldering ball-grid-array memory chips, which is very much expert-grade work.
Along the way, he's talking about some of the ways that these devices are made. A typical flash drive has a small controller chip that has the logic, and one or more large memory chips that store the data. There are also "monolithic" chips that do both. Sometimes some of the smaller circuit boards with monolithic chips on them will have solder pads on the bottom of the board that connect directly to the memory part of the chip, bypassing the controller part. Why? Well, sometimes the controller parts don't work but the memory parts do, so they take those broken boards and solder them to a slightly larger board with another controller chip on it -- and that's where a lot of the really cheap USB flash drives come from, and why they're so cheap.
Anyway, I found his work very interesting, and also pleasantly relaxing to watch. So, if you're into that sort of thing, I recommend it.
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