A memory stick is a flash chip and a controller, and when a stick dies it is nearly always the controller or a cracked connector rather than the memory holding your files. This page covers the six ways they fail, why USB data recovery is not simply a matter of reading the chip, the counterfeit capacity problem, and what the flat £250 + VAT flash band buys.
USB sticks and pen drives are £250 + VAT, the same flash band as a memory card, at any capacity. A snapped connector costs no more than a dead controller. The diagnostic that produces your figure is free and closes two working days after booking in.
A USB stick has no moving parts, so it does not wear out gracefully or make a noise on the way down. It works, and then it does not, and the shape of the failure decides everything that follows.
The metal connector has been levered sideways while the stick was in a laptop, and the joints where it meets the board have cracked. This is the most common physical fault and one of the more hopeful ones, because the memory is untouched and the work is to get a reliable connection back to the board long enough to read it.
No sound, no light, no drive letter, no entry in Disk Management. Try a second port and a second machine before concluding anything. If it is genuinely silent everywhere, the controller has usually failed, and reaching the memory means going round it rather than through it.
The stick appears with a drive letter and no usable size, and a dialogue offers to format it. Refuse. The file system header has been damaged, most often by the stick being pulled out mid-write, and the files behind it are normally intact. Accepting the offer writes an empty structure over the index.
A 128GB stick presenting as 8MB, or as some peculiar number. That is usually the controller falling back to a default state because its own firmware has become unreadable. Occasionally it means the stick was a counterfeit all along and never had the capacity printed on it.
Heat means something on the board is drawing current it should not, and every further insertion risks finishing the job. A stick that reads only when held at a particular angle has a broken joint. Neither should be nursed along for one more copy, because the run that finally kills it is the one you needed.
Through the machine in a trouser pocket, or under a chair leg. Flash memory survives water surprisingly often, provided nobody powers it up while it is damp and nobody puts it on a radiator. Physical crushing is worse but not automatically fatal, since a cracked case says nothing about the chip inside it.
Take the case off a memory stick and there is a small board with a metal connector at one end, a flash memory chip, and a controller. The memory stores the data. The controller decides where in that memory each piece goes, spreads writes around so that no part wears out first, hides cells that have failed and keeps a private table translating what your computer asked for into where the bytes physically sit.
That table is the reason a USB data recovery job is not simply a matter of reading the chip. If the controller stops working, the memory below it can be perfectly healthy and completely unreadable, because nothing outside the stick knows the translation any more. Getting the data back then means reading the memory directly and reconstructing the mapping from the patterns in what comes off, which is slow and skilled work rather than anything a piece of software can do.
It also explains why sticks fail so abruptly. There is no noise to warn you and no gradual slowdown. The controller either answers or it does not, and the day it stops is usually the first hint anything was wrong.
Most sticks that arrive here are not electronically dead at all; they have simply been broken. The connector is soldered to the board at four or five small points, and a laptop lifted while the stick is plugged in puts all the leverage on those joints. They crack, and the stick then works intermittently, or only under pressure, or not at all.
That is good news, because the memory chip has not been touched. The work is to restore a solid connection, read the contents once, cleanly, and put them somewhere safe. Where the board is too damaged to revive, the chip itself can be lifted and read on a programmer, and the file structures reassembled from the raw image afterwards.
What does not help is trying to keep using a broken stick. Every insertion into a socket flexes cracked joints a little further, and the short-circuit that finishes a board usually happens during one of those hopeful last attempts. If a stick has to be wiggled to be seen, stop wiggling it.
Three situations end badly and it is better to say so here than later. A stick that has been securely erased or overwritten is gone; there is no shadow copy underneath. A stick whose memory chip is physically destroyed — cracked, burnt, snapped through — has nothing left to read, whatever the case looks like. And the very small, very thin sticks are frequently monolithic, meaning the controller and the memory are moulded into one sealed lump with no separate chip to lift, which makes them a much harder proposition.
The counterfeit problem is worth repeating too. A great many cheap high-capacity sticks are small sticks with the firmware told to lie about their size. They work until the writing wraps around on itself, at which point the earlier files are destroyed rather than merely lost, and no recovery reaches them. If the capacity looked too good for the price, that is very likely the story.
USB sticks, pen drives and memory cards all sit in the flash band at £250 + VAT, regardless of capacity, brand or how the fault happened. There is no separate charge for a snapped connector and no premium for a large stick.
The full table, so there is nothing to discover later: a single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT; a CCTV or DVR recorder disk is £400 + VAT, as is any BitLocker or otherwise encrypted drive; RAID sets, NAS units, SANs and servers start at £500 + VAT and rise with the number of member disks; forensic investigation with a full written report is £800 + VAT, and a binary image with deleted-file extraction and no report is £400 + VAT. A ransomware-encrypted drive is priced as ordinary media.
Logical work on a stick — deleted files, a format prompt, a damaged file system — carries no fix, no fee. Chip-level work does not, and neither do electronic and mechanical failures, DVR jobs or forensic jobs. Physical work takes fifty per cent of the quoted figure upfront. The diagnostic is free whatever the outcome, closes two working days after the stick is booked in, and most stick recoveries are finished within two to four working days of you agreeing the figure.
Wrap the stick so that nothing can press on it, then send it inside a rigid envelope or a small box; a bare stick in a paper envelope goes through the sorting machinery and comes out worse than it went in. If the connector is already snapped or loose, put the pieces in a small bag together — every fragment is worth having, including the cap and any broken plastic.
Write down what was on it and roughly when it stopped working. Whether the stick was pulled out during a copy, dropped, washed or simply stopped appearing changes what is tried first at the bench. Send it to Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4GP, or hand it in there on a weekday between 9:00am and 5:30pm — about fifty-five miles from Coventry down the M40, if you would rather deliver it yourself. Nobody collects and there is no counter in Coventry.
The sticks that come in from around Coventry and Warwickshire are rarely holiday photographs. They are the presentation somebody was carrying between offices, the dissertation chapter a student moved off a laptop the week before submission, the CAD file walked from a design office to a workshop floor, the accounts a small business kept on a stick because it was easier than a network share, the parish or club records that live on one drive in one drawer.
The common thread is that the stick was being used as storage rather than as transport. That is what a memory stick is worst at, because it has no warning signs and no redundancy. If yours is still readable today, copy it somewhere else this afternoon and treat everything after that as a bonus.
A stick that has to be wiggled has cracked joints, and the attempt that finally kills it is usually the one you needed to work.
Small media is the simplest thing in the world to send, and the post treats it far better than a week in a coat pocket or a glovebox does. A padded envelope given to a courier in Warwickshire on a weekday tends to be booked in at Oxford the next morning, and you are told the moment it lands.
As a rule the storage comes out and the machine stays where it is. That applies to a laptop, a tower, an iMac and to the recorder sitting under a counter. Taking equipment apart is not something this bench does, and a repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes. Two things go the other way: an external drive stays sealed inside its own case, and a NAS travels as a complete unit with its disks still in their bays. A Fusion Mac is a third case — both of its drives come out and travel together, each one labelled. The single situation nobody can work around is memory soldered flat onto a mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon Macs and a good many slim laptops are built: if the storage will not unbolt, there is no parcel to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. From Coventry it is roughly fifty-five miles straight down the M40, about an hour if you would rather drive it in than post it. Either way you are told the moment it is logged, and the free diagnostic finishes two working days later.
Unsure what ought to go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it do the asking.