Mobile phones, tablets, NVMe, USB drives and solid-state drives all store data on NAND flash memory chips. This method is to undertake data recovery on flash devices – chip-off. This technique allows data recovery engineers access to a low-level image of the device’s data. Traditional magnetic hard drives tend to be very similar in design and have a common approach to storing data. Flash devices, on the other hand, can vary massively in structure, with numerous file structures, algorithms and memory types. For this reason, data recovery from flash devices is much more difficult and time-consuming, in contrast to magnetic storage devices. To obtain a bit-for-bit copy of the raw data stored on the flash memory, the NAND chips need to be interrogated directly – and chip-off is the main technique to do this.

Chip-off involves removing an individual memory chip from a circuit board and reading it. De-soldering the memory chip from the circuitry has to be done with extreme precision; our engineers always work under microscopes, as one tiny mistake can lead to permanent data loss. Upon removal from the circuitry, data recovery can be attempted by reading the chip with data extractors. NAND chips, utilised in USB flash drives and solid-state drives, are typically the easiest type of flash chip to work with in terms of data recovery, due to the pin configuration being standardised. Other chips, like BGA, have multiple connectors soldered to the motherboard, which can be much more difficult to remove.