Blizzard Data Recovery

05/25/2025

Samsung LIF RAID Solid State Drives – When your SSD is actually two!

RAID data recovery for Samsung LIF Solid State Drives. These dual SSD drives with unique LIF interface can be a challenge.

11/16/2022

If you've ever had a flash drive fail, or even if you haven't but keep important data on USB drives, here are some things to consider.

Data recovery customers ask me all the time: "What's the best flash drive to get? What is the most reliable thumb drive?" Here's why that's not the right way to look at it.

05/16/2022

If your data is important to you, here's another example why you should think twice before entrusting your broken flash drive to the first person you find with a soldering iron.

Sometimes DIY USB flash drive repair is not the best option if you really need the data recovered.

11/03/2021

New toy came in today from Multi-COM.PL! TSOP-48 Wide adapter board for those NAND chips that are too fussy for the standard reader.

10/20/2021

We see a lot of attempted DIY flash drive repairs that end up coming to us for data recovery, so before you crank up that soldering iron, here are some things to consider.

Broken flash drive repair can look simple, but here are some things to consider before trying that DIY repair.

10/08/2021

Apparently there's no such thing as a bad component in flash manufacturing. Even an entire flash drive can become a component for another flash drive!

This monolithic USB flash drive (right) piggybacked on a conventional USB drive (left) as its memory chip. My guess is the monolith's controller failed quality control, but the NAND tested good and the chip was repurposed.

If you want to read more about the differences between these types of devices, see our tech lab post: https://www.blizzarddr.com/flash-monolith-pinout-analysis/

10/01/2021

Happy October! We kicked off spooky season with Attack of the Killer Flash Controllers as this one tried to burn its way out of its own skin. 👻

A shorted flash controller can heat up badly enough to melt the drive's plastic shell - you can see the melted divot here. Luckily, no data was harmed in the making of this horror story.

09/22/2021

Who ordered the quadruple decker?

Once upon a time, this was a valid way to fit a whopping 512 megabytes on a flash drive: slap an extra circuit board on top and throw more memory chips on it.

Now we have hundreds of times the capacity on a single chip, but isn't that a little boring compared to stacked circuit boards?

08/31/2021

This poor flash drive lost its USB-C connector, but that's OK, it has two more connectors. (This isn't what we meant when we said you should have a backup!)

04/04/2021

Just pulled these Squiddies (Sentinels) off
the side of our spacecraft.

01/31/2021

The Case for Flat Rate Data Recovery: A 2020 Retrospective. https://www.blizzarddr.com/flat-rate-data-recovery-is-possible/

11/17/2020

Advanced flash drive data recovery. https://www.blizzarddr.com/flash-recovery-cbm2091-controller/