A laptop bag swung into a library desk in East Kilbride; the USB stick in the side port took the hit and folded. On it: the sole current copy of four years of postgraduate research. This one came down to a single black chip.
The stick arrived in a padded envelope, connector bent through forty-five degrees with the board cracked behind it — and, sensibly, untouched since: no pliers, no “wiggle it and see”, no repeated insertions that grind cracked traces into powder. The owner had already been told by two shops that snapped sticks were unrecoverable. Both were wrong in the usual, forgivable way: unrecoverable by them.
A USB stick is essentially two things: a connector-and-controller front end, and the NAND flash chip where data physically lives. The impact had destroyed the front end — connector sheared, traces cracked, controller unreachable — while the NAND sat undamaged a centimetre away. The data wasn’t lost; it was locked behind broken plumbing.
With board-level repair ruled out by the trace damage, the NAND was lifted from the board and read raw in a programmer — every physical page, straight off the silicon. Raw NAND isn’t files: the controller’s wear-levelling scatter, interleave and error-correction had to be unpicked in software before a file system emerged from the dump. It did — complete.
The full research directory — drafts, data, references, the works — verified and returned within the week on an encrypted USB (a better one), alongside unsolicited but heartfelt advice about cloud sync. £250 + VAT, the standard card-and-stick band; chip-level work is included in it, not an ambush on top. The stick itself was returned in pieces, as a paperweight with a moral.
If the NAND survived, the data usually did too. Post it in untouched — free diagnosis, £250 + VAT flat if you proceed, no fix no fee.