The commonest way a USB stick dies, and the one with the best odds. A knock while plugged in shears the connector from the board — but the break is at the solder joint, and the flash on the other side of it is usually untouched.
← All case files · £250 + VAT, flat
A wedding photographer had a stick in a laptop port when the laptop was knocked off a table at a venue. The connector stayed in the port; the body of the stick came away with the board still attached.
On it were the day’s images, not yet copied anywhere. She had, sensibly, not attempted to push the two parts back together.
the memory package and controller were undamaged, with no sign of stress cracking or heat.
which is what made this more than a straightforward re-solder — there was nothing left to attach to on two of the four contacts.
so the connections existed on the board; only their termination points had gone.
This is the usual anatomy of a snapped stick. The connector shroud is soldered to the board and takes all the leverage of an impact, so it gives way first — and everything that actually holds your data sits beyond the point of failure.
Where pads have torn away, the route is to work back to the traces themselves. Under magnification the lacquer was removed to expose the intact trace beneath each missing pad, and fine wire bonded directly to it, restoring the two lost connections without relying on the damaged surface.
Rather than rebuilding the stick for reuse, the four connections were brought out to a test jig — the objective is one clean read, not a working device. The stick enumerated immediately and was imaged read-only in a single pass.
Everything, in four days. The images were verified by rendering rather than counting and returned on fresh media.
The stick itself was not rebuilt for further use. A board with wire-bonded repairs is a recovery vehicle rather than a reliable device, and there is no reason to trust it with anything again.
A snapped USB stick is among the most recoverable failures we see, because the break happens at the weakest mechanical point rather than anywhere near the storage. Do not try to reconnect the parts, do not wiggle it into a port to see whether it reads, and if a piece has broken off, send that too.
The one thing that reduces the odds is repeated insertion afterwards — a stick that reads only when held at an angle has cracked joints, and each attempt fatigues what remains. USB sticks and memory cards are from £250 +VAT after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
Bring the drive to our Oxford Science Park reception, or post it over — it costs nothing to learn what went wrong. You’ll have a written figure from the fixed bands before any work begins.