Nasty Chinese USB flash.

[pcimage]

I though I'd seen it all, with micro SD cards soldered to USB board and crap like that, but this is a new one on me....

Attachments

[Nicky]

Wow Let us see the bottom of chip and results.

Thanks for the pic.

[pcimage]

And on removing the monolith SD....

Attachments

[HaQue]

Dang I wish I could stumble apon these! I have been buying from dodgy looking ebay sites for ages trying to get some interesting devices and all I can seem to get is ones with Alcor controllers pretending to be others and some really dodgy IDE branded ones that I cant find out anything about them.

But if the device works, and is advertised capacity and is also a decent speed.. does it really matter if it is an SD in there.. I doubt consumers would care or even know it was not usual.

does it work? maybe after recovery you could try h2testw on it?

BTW could you post a pic of other side and/or say controller number?

thanks for posting

[pcimage]

Photo of chip side.....

Controller is AU6989SNHL

Nope, it doesn't work!

Attachments

[pcimage]

And with the monolith SD...

Attachments

[arvika]

I have such case about two years ago. Really crazy solution

[HaQue]

I wonder if the SD cards were tested and failed at a controller level, but NAND was ok, and they decided to cut wastage/save on NAND chips and solder the SD directly to the PCB using same pinouts we normally would wire to adapter?

Using it this way, the speed should be same as any other USB device, shouldn't it?

BTW how did recovery go?

[pcimage]

So far, OK.

I got the monolith connected up and read (Sergey @ Soft Center had to make new config for NAND reader, odd page size), found layout and ECC.

Correcting ECC (lots of, and presumably why the stick failed) now....

[pcimage]

Data recovered

[HaQue]

Well done
I hope you get to keep the drive as a souvenir.. unless you aren't as obsessed, I mean interested in Flash as I am

[GreyDKang]

Data recovered

It had 8bit nand?

[pcimage]

Data recovered

It had 8bit nand?

Yes, that's right. Luckily