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Related Background
Today has been a highly informationized time, and the importance of data has been acknowledged in people’s everyday lives. Data security is now a real concrete problem people have to confront in their life and work; as the science technology develops rapidly, the main stream data storage media has been changed from hard drives to various types. Flash memory is one of the newly born storage media in today’s rapid development. Since flash memory is non-volatile, no power is needed to maintain the information stored in the chip. In addition, flash memory offers fast read access times (although not as fast as volatile DRAM memory used for main memory in PCs) and better kinetic shock resistance than hard disks. These characteristics explain the popularity of flash memory in portable devices. Another feature of flash memory is that when packaged in a "memory card," it is enormously durable, being able to withstand intense pressure, extremes of temperature, and even immersion in water. But because of the specialty of the flash storage principle, compared with hard drive, its service life is quite short, and the rate of malfunction is rapidly increased by times.
The August of 2009 is doomed to be a milestone for data recovery industry. The global largest data recovery R&D institute of information security industry, SalvationDATA Technology, LLC, announced its Flash Doctor which is designed to cope with data recovery from flash memories such as USB pendrive, SD card, CF card and so on. For an instant it drew a great attention of people from all sectors of society, especially the data recovery industry. The present writer was lucky to get a chance to be involved in the beta test. So will SalvationDATA Flash Doctor become the best and must-have tool for flash data recovery industry?
The causes of the flash memory malfunction can be various; they can be defined as the following situations in raw:
A. Logical problems such as data lost due to delete, format, virus infection and so on. Recovery in such case will be relatively simple; just like hard drive data recovery, we can do it by using common data recovery software.
B. Flash memory with bad blocks, which manifests itself as: correct capacity of the device can be detected, the flash memory can be access by using tools like WinHex; most of the time it hangs the computer when it was connected to the computer; or it hangs when you perform a copy and paste operation or the device becomes off-line during the process (the OS reports it as a instable/undetected device).
C. Totally undetected when it was connected to the computer. It is a common problem in data recovery practice; most of the time it is because of rosin joint or front-end PCB damage, and it can be fixed by soldering or change the front-end PCB.
D. It was detected with false parameters. This is the most complicated malfunction to handle with, which is caused by the lost/damage of the key firmware (controller), and Flash Doctor was designed to cope with this kind of complicated malfunction in fact.
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