HDD GURU FORUMS

DIY... But actually a pretty good job and an interesting reading : http://joshuawise.com/projects/ndfslave

Yes pretty good, I linked to that earlier this week in another thread.

The guy obviously knew quite a bit of related stuff such as coding that helped, and quite a good knack at troubleshooting and analysis. I thought the XOR work was particularly clever. Talking to Jeremy Brock was a good move too

One of the takeaways from this is that a project may look daunting to start with, but with a bit of elbow grease, the answers are out there.

Another interesting read is http://spritesmods.com/?art=ftdinand&page=1 where he shows how to use an FTDI to read a nand chip.
first version was this using Paralell interface which I guess is reall to boast that he cann make and solder 0.5mm pitch at home


and this one took spritesmods stuff and extended it. https://github.com/bkerler/NANDReader_FTDI

So no matter what your budget, you can still play around with a lot of stuff.