Devices · USB sticks and flash drives
Cards and sticks are £250 + VAT, with the free look coming first. What arrives is almost never something anyone meant to rely on: the year of invoices held nowhere else, or an afternoon's copy that quietly became the only one. Plugs snap off. Controllers go quiet. The memory nearly always survives both, and that is where the bench starts. A few come in every week — a Newark dealer's stock photographs, a postgraduate's thesis chapter off University Park in Nottingham, the quotes a Hinckley fitter carries from job to job.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
0115 8220606
| What is happening | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Only this from Windows: Unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed) | Nothing whatever. The controller has stopped replying | Stop working through the ports |
| On screen: USB device not recognized | The device never finishes enumerating | Try one more port, then leave it |
| Windows will not open it until you format it | A broken file system, and unbroken files | Say no to the format prompt |
| 0 bytes when it mounts, and then: insert a disk into removable disk | Its own memory has gone out of the controller's sight | That is chip-level work |
| 0x80070570 on every open — Windows calls the file or directory corrupted | Broken FAT or exFAT structures | Recoverable, provided nothing more gets written |
| It says: Windows was unable to complete the format | The controller has died outright | That refusal is in your favour |
Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.
On an older stick the memory package comes off its board and gets read separately. A monolith has nothing that lifts: one lump of resin holds both memory and controller, and the entry point is a line of test pads measured in fractions of a millimetre.
Blocks get moved about the die by wear levelling, and interleaving spreads them across the planes for speed. A raw read hands all of that back jumbled, and it is unpicked in software, layer by layer, until named files with real dates appear.
You see the list of files before anything else. There is no bill until you have accepted that list, and what comes back travels on fresh media, with return postage at our end.
The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.
Plain speaking about the statistics: there is no consumer flash failure rate worth repeating. Nobody runs sticks in fleets, data centres count spinning disks instead, and so the numbers were never gathered. What can honestly be described is what arrives here, and the pattern repeats year on year — physical faults are nearly all a connector parted from its board, and the ones that simply stop tend to be unbranded, or free off a trade stand.
Seven years of invoices, the CIS records with them, and a return falling due — all on one stick trodden into a site office floor. Its connector had parted company with the board, and since a monolith gives you nothing to plug into, the controller's pinout was worked out and the data read straight from the test pads. That return was filed on time.
Rarely. That shell carries contacts and nothing else; your files are held in the memory package sitting behind it. Broken in two, a stick usually still reads — the test is whether the package and the resin around it survived the break.
No. What stopped answering is the controller, and the memory underneath it did not. Reach that memory directly and the controller's opinion stops mattering.
Poor NAND driven by a poor controller. Some go further and misdescribe their own capacity: a small die dressed up as a large one, faultless right until you pass what is physically there. Fine for shifting a film from one machine to the next. Not fine as anybody's only copy.
One: a memory die cracked right through. Stopped controllers, boards in three pieces, mapping tables that make no sense — that is just an ordinary week.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.