Move NAND from one thumb drive to another?

[lcoughey]

When the controller or the circuit board fails on a USB thumb drive, most data recovery labs remove the NAND chips, extract the RAW data and then virtually replicate the controller algorithms in order to recover the data. But, many have asked the question, why not just move the NAND to another working thumb drive? The answer is that you need to have a thumb drive with a controller that uses the exact same algorithms to store the data on the NAND. As there is no standardization on that, plus unique ways of encrypting the data, it tends to be more complicated and expensive to find a suitable match.

That said, the claim of a successful recovery at the following link contradicts everything. They must have gotten very lucky, as the two controllers aren't even the same brand and would have a very low chance of being a suitable match.

http://imgur.com/gallery/roy9P/new

Anyway, I don't recommend following this guy's instructions unless you don't care about losing your data.

[italyassistance]

We were lucky with a 32 GB Lexar CF card. The customer had bought them a few months apart. They were apparently identical. Using PC3K we were able to get a few quality jpgs and a lot of junk. So as a last resort we tried this route and the recovery went very well.

[lcoughey]

Great, thanks for reporting.

[Joep]

FWIW, I had it work but ..

why not just move the NAND to another working thumb drive?

Because often the NAND itself and the firmware on it is the problem. Moving NAND moves the problem with it.