All data recovery companies, regardless of skill, unanimously say that if the memory chip of a device has just a hair line crack, data recovery is impossible. Not unlikely, not expensive, but impossible. One company even stated that even the FBI can't retrieve the data. Is this true?
Why is this? I find it hard to believe if just a tiny section of an extremely common chip has a tiny crack, all of the data is completely gone.
I would have thought some talented person somewhere would be able to patch up the area of the chip and get some of the data back…
Is it something to do with the charge? I know flash memory uses transistors to store its ones and zeroes in the form of an electrical charge. If the chip is cracked, do the transistors "short-out", turning them all to zeroes, something like that? Is the data gone rather than irretrievable?
All I want to get are some awesome holiday videos back. Thought they were gone for good, then I learned about data retrieval, thought I had a good chance of getting them back and then I realised there's not really a chance at all if the memory chip is cracked.
How much would retrieval be? Hundreds? Or thousands? A million, as RedGrittyBrick says? If were to hold onto the memory card, in a few years do you reckon the price of such an advanced retrieval could come down? Or is this just being unrealistic?
We're talking about a 256mb sd card here.
I suppose technologies are moving away from SD cards and more to integrated memory and then goodness knows what else…atomic memory, DNA memory..You don't see people coming out with new advanced procedures regarding cassette tapes today, do you? Should I just bite the bullet and give up?
Also, I'm not even a hobbyist in this field, however I am interested in general by how things work so if someone could explain simply the problem I would appreciate it.
Best Answer
Lets be frank. They are not worth $1M to you are they. For that sort of money you could go on that holiday again a few times and recapture the same photos or something equally awesome.
The technologies used to manufacture flash memory do not lend themselves to repairing cracked ICs. The manufacturing approach is to simply test and discard defective dies. There is no established technology capable of making repairs.
A silicon fab capable of manufacturing ICs costs $1bn. Any plant capable of repairing ICs is likely to be similarly expensive - it would need high volume usage to be economical. There just isn't that demand, most people probably find it cheaper and easier to copy photos onto a few $50 hard disks than to hope for sci-fi movie tech to rescue them.
Your talented person might need millions of dollars worth of equipment, a university-grade set of research labs, a large team of postgraduates and years or decades of funding.
Some of the data may still be present in undamaged parts of the chip but conventional retrieval is likely to be completely dependent on damaged portions.
Imagine examining 2,000,000,000 individual grains of sand one at a time under a microscope. That's the scale of task involved. Grains of sand are much bigger than transistors of course. Transistors on flash-memory chips are far too small to see.
In a few hundred years?
Unless you are a billionaire with nothing much else to do who can fit this into some kind of bigger plan.