USB Flash Drive Destroyed by DIY Chip-Off: Micro-Soldering Repair Attempt
A customer tried removing the NAND chip from their USB drive with a soldering iron. The result: ripped pads, bent pins, solder bridges, and broken traces. Louis attempts to repair the damage and recover the data.
Assessing the Wreckage
The drive arrived with the full catalog of DIY chip-off damage: contact pads torn off the PCB, NAND chip pins bent and twisted, solder bridges shorting multiple pins together, and PCB traces scraped through. The customer also provided a donor USB drive, hoping the NAND chip could be swapped onto a working board.
Removing a BGA or QFP chip requires even, controlled heat and vacuum tools. A standard soldering iron heats one spot at a time, which rips the pads off the board when you try to lift the chip. That is what happened here.
Micro-Soldering Repair Under the Microscope
Louis works through the damage systematically: removing solder bridges by carefully heating each one, straightening bent pins (0.3-0.5mm diameter) one at a time under magnification, and cleaning up residual flux. For missing pads, he scrapes the protective coating off the underlying trace to expose bare copper, then solders a hair-thin wire from the exposed trace to the corresponding NAND pin.
He notes that lead-free solder creates dull, matte joints, so he reflows some pads with leaded solder for more reliable connections. He also points out practical tool management: using a $2 fiberglass pen for scraping instead of destroying a $50 micro-pencil tip.
One disconnected power pin is left unrepaired based on the hope that it is redundant. NAND chips typically have multiple power and ground pins; if even one critical connection is missing, the chip will not respond.
Why NAND Chip Swapping Rarely Works
Even with a donor drive of the same model, the internal NAND, controller, and PCB layout frequently differ between manufacturing batches. The donor controller must match the original NAND's pin configuration, timing parameters, and firmware. Buying the same SKU from the same store does not guarantee any of this.
This is why most professional labs use direct NAND interfacing (reading the chip through a Spiderboard or VNR reader) instead of chip swapping. It bypasses the controller entirely and does not require a matching donor.
USB Drive Not Working? Please Don't Take a Soldering Iron to It.
If the data matters, send it in before the damage compounds. A drive that was simply unrecognized could have been recovered in hours. After a failed chip-off, it becomes a borderline case.