Devices · USB sticks & flash drives
No one plans to trust a memory stick with anything that matters. It happens all the same — the accounts, with no copy anywhere else, or a backup meant to cover a week that is now into its third year. Plugs shear off and controllers stop answering; either way, the flash inside usually comes through fine. That chip is where the job starts, and a steady run of them arrives from Cardiff.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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| What shows up | What has gone wrong | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) in Device Manager | Total silence from the stick; its controller has stopped | Stop moving it between ports |
| USB device not recognized | It never gets through enumeration | One more port, then leave it alone |
| You need to format the disk in drive X: | Damaged file system, undamaged data beneath | Decline the offer to format it |
| Please insert a disk into removable disk — and 0 bytes shown | The controller can no longer see its own flash | Work at the chip level |
| 0x80070570 on opening — file or directory corrupted and unreadable | The FAT or exFAT structures are damaged | Repairable, if nothing more is written |
| Windows was unable to complete the format | The controller is not coming back | A refusal you should be glad of |
The diagnosis costs you nothing. Every item that arrives is logged under a case number of its own, and an engineer works out what has actually failed — then tells you plainly which files can come back and which cannot. The price follows that: one fixed figure, in writing, and no work begins until you have read it and said go ahead.
Older sticks let you take the memory package off the board and read it by itself. A monolith gives you nothing to remove — flash and controller are moulded into one block — so the route in is a line of test pads, each a fraction of a millimetre across.
Wear levelling shuffles blocks around. Interleaving splits them across planes to gain speed. What comes off the chip is scrambled by both. Layer by layer it is unpicked in software, until proper files with names and dates on them appear again.
The list of what came off reaches you first, nothing is charged until you say yes, and it all travels back on media bought new.
Nothing is billed while you are still deciding. A complete listing of what came off the drive reaches you first, and the invoice only follows your yes. Files travel back on media bought new for the job, return postage ours, and we do not close it here until every one of them opens on the machine you will use.
An honest word on the odds: there is no published failure rate for consumer flash worth leaning on. Nobody keeps memory sticks in fleets or audits them the way hard disks get audited, so the numbers were never gathered. What arrives here is a narrow sample, but the story repeats every year: nearly all the physical damage we see is a broken connector, and the ones that die without warning are almost always unbranded or handed out at a conference.
A boot in a site office parted the connector from the board. Seven years of invoices went with it, and the CIS records too, with a tax return waiting. Nothing on a monolith gives you a port to attach to, so the controller's pinout was mapped and the work done at the test pads. It was all filed on time.
Usually not. That plug is a contact and nothing else. The memory package that actually holds your files sits behind it, and a stick snapped in half will normally still read — so long as neither the package nor the moulded wafer has picked up a crack.
No. What has gone quiet is the controller, not the flash sitting beneath it. Read the flash directly and the controller stops being part of the problem.
Weak flash sitting behind a weak controller. A few go further and misreport their capacity — a small die claiming to be a large one, which works faultlessly until you write past the memory that genuinely exists. Fine for carrying a film across town. Not for the only copy of anything.
Only in one situation: a memory die cracked all the way through. Dead controllers, a board in three pieces, translation tables in chaos — all of that is an ordinary week on the bench.
A failing drive has only so many starts left in it. Spend none of them. Keep the power off, and the free diagnosis will tell you what is still readable.