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# USB Flash Drive Recovery
When you have irreplaceable data stored on your flash drive, it is all too easy to lose access to it. If you’ve lost critical data on your USB flash drive, Gillware provides cutting-edge USB flash drive repair and recovery services.
USB flash drives are one of the many modern conveniences we all take for granted today. A USB drive is small and portable (about the size of a human thumb, hence the nickname “thumb drive”) and can be easily pocketed and brought from one computer to another. And because flash drives are solid-state devices, they can survive being dropped from far greater heights than a hard disk drive. With no moving parts, solid-state data storage devices have fewer points of failure than other storage devices.
But a USB drive is still very vulnerable due to its small size and portable nature. The circuit board can be shorted out. The USB plug can become bent or torn off if the drive is bumped or jostled roughly enough while plugged in. Ejecting a USB flash drive too suddenly can cause damage to the filesystem.
#### Do you have a broken USB drive and need your data?
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## Why Choose Gillware for My USB Flash Drive Data Recovery Needs?
Gillware Data Recovery employs full-time data recovery technicians and computer scientists dedicated to staying on the cutting-edge of data storage and recovery technologies. At Gillware, we offer financially risk-free flash drive recovery services. We charge no evaluation fees, and even offer to cover the cost of inbound shipping. We don’t show you a bill until we’ve finished our recovery efforts. If we don’t recover any of the data you need, you owe us nothing.
#### Talk to a Flash Drive Data Recovery Expert Today!
Our client advisors are available by phone during business hours (M – F: 8am – 7pm; Sat: 10am – 3pm).
**1-877-624-7206 ext.****1**
Send us an email including the type of device you have and the problem you are experiencing. A client advisor will respond within 25 minutes during business hours (M – F: 8am – 7pm; Sat: 10am – 3pm).
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Have a quick question about the data recovery process? Use our chat feature to chat with one of our client advisors (not a robot!) during business hours (M – F: 8am – 7pm; Sat: 10am – 3pm).
**Click here to chat!**
Want to schedule a call for a time that is convenient for you? Click the button above to schedule a brief consultation with one of our client advisors.
## What’s In a USB Drive?
There are three major components to any USB flash device: the NAND chip, controller chip, and USB plug. Most important is the . This is where all the data and files on your USB drive are stored. While the technology is radically different, it plays the same role as the platters in a hard disk drive. The NAND chip is attached to a printed circuit board along with a controller chip. The controller pieces the data flowing to and from the NAND chip together. Finally, there is the USB plug itself, which connects to the PCB and fits into the USB port on your computer.
Thumb drives removed from their casing for USB flash drive recovery Top: The 48-pin NAND flash memory chip mounted to the thumb drive’s PCB. Bottom: The controller chip mounted to the underside of the PCB
All USB flash devices have these components. But if you crack open your USB drive’s casing, you might not be able to see all of them. You may open up your USB drive and see, instead of a large black NAND chip and small controller chip on a green circuit board and a silver USB plug, a simple black rectangle with four gold “fingers”. All of the major components are still there—they’ve just been soldered together into a , or “monolith”.
There are a few advantages to this monolithic construction. It’s smaller, more water-resistant, more durable, and cheaper to manufacture. And it bears a striking resemblance to the iconic monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Although that’s more of an aesthetic advantage than a practical one.) The main disadvantage is that it takes more effort for our engineers to access the data on the USB flash drive.
## USB Flash Drive Recovery Situations
There are two common “tiers” of flash drive data recovery cases we see here at Gillware. The first tier involves cases in which the connection between the USB plug and PCB has been damaged. The second involves cases in which the PCB has been damaged and the NAND chip must be removed from it.
#### **Tier 1: USB Plug Repair**
For USB devices where all the components are discrete, there is one major weak point. The connection between the USB plug and circuit board is very fragile. If you have your flash drive plugged into a USB port and accidentally hit or bump the device, you could bend or shear off the leads connecting the plug to the circuit board. This is one of the more common reasons people bring their thumb drives to us.
It takes a highly skilled engineer some time with our soldering equipment to repair flash drive damage like this so that we can start file recovery. After we repair a flash drive, recovering lost data from it is usually a simple matter. There may be some data loss or corruption to files we recover from flash drive damage, particularly if the USB flash drive was damaged in the middle of a write operation.
#### **Tier 2: Raw** NAND **Chip Read**
In cases where the circuit board itself has been damaged or shorted, flash drive data recovery involves removing the NAND chip from the board and reading its contents using a chip reader. The data on the NAND chip is nothing like what a data recovery engineer can find on a hard drive’s platters. The NAND chip’s contents are a jumbled mess of both user data and the system data the flash drive needs to operate. It is the job of the controller chip to make sense of all this. For us, reading the chip is the easy part. Our USB flash drive data recovery experts have to write custom software to emulate the controller and reassemble the raw data from the NAND chip.
For monolithic recovery cases, this task is a little more difficult. The monolith can’t be disassembled, but we do still have a way to gain access to the NAND flash memory chip inside. By “spiderwebbing” tiny wires to specific contact points on the device, our USB flash drive experts can access the buried NAND chip. Our R&D director Greg Andrzejewski explains this complex and delicate process in greater detail in .
This is the more complex of the two common tiers USB flash drive data recovery cases fall into. Between the various brands and models of flash drives, each controller chip does its job a little differently. Concerning monoliths, there is no industry standard for the contact points allowing access to the data. Salvaging data directly from a NAND chip requires clever detective work and reverse-engineering.
## More on Flash Memory
Flash memory is a type of non-volatile computer memory invented by Toshiba in 1980. The concept behind flash memory is based on electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) technology. Flash memory utilizes floating gate transistors that closely resemble the transistors in NOR or NAND logic gates. Logic gates are simply groups of transistors capable of giving a predetermined output based on taking multiple binary inputs. As of 2019, Samsung Electronics was by far the largest NAND flash memory manufacturer, with a market share of 34.9% ().
### **Need a different type of data recovery? Check out our other services .**
If you would like to contact us to receive a no-pressure consultation, click the button below. This will take you to a page with our phone number and email. This page also provides you with the option to schedule an appointment with a Client Advisor at a later time or date, or chat with them online.
Click the button below if you would like to send in your device. Sending in your device is financially risk-free. You will be asked to fill out a short form. Once you have completed the form, we will send a shipping label to the address provided. After we receive your device, we will begin a free evaluation and contact you with a firm price quote.
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# Phone Data Recovery Services
Did you forget your phone in your pocket when you jumped into the pool?  Can’t get your phone to turn on? If you’ve taken your phone in to a local shop to get repaired and still can’t seem to get your data back, that’s where Gillware and our experienced technicians come in. We are the experts in cell phone data recovery.
Cell phones often hold some of our most important data. From pictures to contacts and videos, they house it all. Losing this data can be devastating. Here at Gillware we understand that. We see thousands of phone recovery cases each year. We truly are your best shot at getting your valuable data back. Whether your phone is stuck in boot loop or damaged, we are here to assist.
Unfortunately, there are some cases where we are unable to assist in recovering data from cell phones. One common scenario is when a factory reset has been performed on a phone. Once a factory reset has taken place, the data is completely gone. The purpose of the factory reset is to wipe all data from the phone so it can be sold or re-purposed. Another scenario we are unable to recover data from is when the password to get into the phone is forgotten or unknown.
#### Have important data on your phone that needs recovered?
## Why Choose Gillware?
With some of the best and brightest minds in data recovery and digital forensics gathered under one roof, Gillware is the best choice you can make when you need data recovered from a smartphone. Our mobile phone experts are highly trained and highly skilled. In our data recovery and digital forensics labs, we’ve recovered data from phones that have been dropped, run over, burned,  drowned, smashed in a motorcycle accident, and run through every other wringer imaginable. Our in-house data recovery tools and techniques, which are used by both our data recovery lab and our digital forensics lab, are cutting-edge. In addition to charging nothing for our evaluations, we even cover the cost of inbound shipping.
#### Talk to a Cell Phone Data Recovery Expert Today!
**1-877-624-7206 ext.1**
Send us an email including the type of phone you have and the problem you are experiencing. A client advisor will respond within 25 minutes during business hours (M – F: 8am – 7pm; Sat: 10am – 3pm).
 **Click here to chat**
## iPhone Data Recovery Service
iPhones are the most common cell phone data recovery cases we see. However, iPhones can be the most difficult and costly cases as well. In order to conduct Apple iPhone data recovery, we will need the password to the phone. We will also need to be able to get the phone operational, which is often times where extra costs occur. Damaged phones may require us to source new parts or even an entirely new phone in order to recover the data.
While the technology behind the iPhone isn’t so much different from Android phones, the filesystem architecture is very different. Whereas Android mobile phones use open-source Linux filesystems, iPhones and iPads stick with Apple’s proprietary HFS+ architecture. Our data recovery technicians are very well-acquainted with Apple filesystems and are well-versed in recovering lost, deleted, or corrupted data from these devices.
## Android Phone Data Recovery Service
Androids are another common cell phone recovery case we see here at Gillware. Androids can be a bit easier as some of the older models are not encrypted. However, most of the newer models are encrypted. Either way, recovering data from these devices requires senior engineers to spend hours moving recovered data to a new motherboard. Android is based on the Linux kernel, so Android mobile devices have Linux filesystems. There is a wide range of Linux filesystems due to the open-source nature of Linux. Our mobile phone data recovery technicians must be well-versed in all flavors of Linux OSes, from Btrfs to ZFS. It’s common for Android eMMC chips to be formatted with Ext4, or with F2FS, a filesystem designed with the unique characteristics of NAND flash memory chips in mind. We’ve seen thousands of Androids in our lab making us the experts in Android phone data recovery.
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