USB drive & memory card recovery
Drive not recognized, broken connector, unreadable SD card, vanished photos and videos. Small in size, complex in technique: drives and cards combine a controller, NAND memory and, often, a "Monolith" resin block. We handle them all, from USB drive to CFexpress.
Does your device show one of these signs?
Bent USB drive, connector desoldered after a drop or a wrong move in the port.
connector micro-solderingThe drive or card no longer appears, asks to be formatted or shows a wrong size: controller or translation table down.
80%+ on logical failureCamera or drone card wiped by mistake, formatted, or corrupted mid-shoot.
RAW / 4K data carvingOxidized contacts, cracked resin, mute card: the NAND and controller are embedded in a single block.
Spider Web techniqueWhat the laboratory actually does.
Precision micro-soldering
Torn USB connector, cut trace, desoldered capacitor: under a stereo microscope, we rebuild the electrical connections to make the device readable again — long enough to extract the data.
Reverse engineering the FTL
When the device is no longer recognized, the translation table linking logical addresses to NAND pages is often corrupt. We access the controller in factory mode to rebuild it, without the original firmware.
Spider Web technique
On microSD and monolithic drives, the NAND is embedded in the resin with the controller. We expose the internal contact points by controlled abrasion, then micro-solder wires onto them to read the memory — the so-called "Spider Web" technique.
Board-level NAND extraction
If the controller is unrecoverable, we desolder the NAND chip, read its raw content, then reconstruct in software the interleaving, scrambling and ECC specific to the controller.
Signature-based data carving
For files whose metadata is gone (format, corruption), we rebuild RAW, JPEG, MP4 and MOV by recognizing their binary signatures — including fragmented 4K video.
Success rates across 120,000+ cases.
Averages observed since 2004 on USB drives and memory cards.
All formats, USB & cards.
USB 2.0/3.x and USB-C drives, SD, SDHC, SDXC, microSD, CompactFlash and CFexpress cards, XQD and Memory Stick. RAW photos (CR3, NEF, ARW), 4K / 6K video from cameras, drones and action cams.
What you must never do to a failing drive or card
- Keep using it or take new photos — every write overwrites recoverable data.
- Accept the OS's "format the disk?" prompt — a format badly complicates recovery.
- Force a bent USB connector into the port — risk of tearing off the NAND or breaking traces.
- Run repair software repeatedly — it writes to the device and lowers the odds.
- Try to "fix" a Monolith card yourself — abrasion without proper tooling destroys the contact points.
The golden rule: remove the device, stop all writes, and hand it over. For photos, take no further images on the affected card.
Specialist answers.
My USB drive isn't recognized — files recoverable?+
I formatted my SD card — are my photos lost?+
What is a "Monolith" card or drive?+
My drive's connector is broken — is it repairable?+
How much does recovery cost?+
Understand flash memory.
This page describes the service. For the detailed methodology, two Guide chapters complement these devices.
USB drive methodology
Connector, controller, Monolith, chip-off: recognize the failure and understand the laboratory's approach.
Read the chapter →SD card methodology
RAW photos, 4K video, Spider Web, data carving: saving the memories on an SD or microSD card.
Read the chapter →Drive or card unreadable?
Remove it, stop all writes, and send it to us. Free diagnosis within 24h, your file list before any payment.