Data Recovery from Flash Storage Devices

A Flash storage device describes those systems that use Flash memory. It is basically an electronic non-volatile computer storage medium that retains data even without a power supply.

What are Flash storage devices?

Flash memory size refers to memory chips, which are comparatively smaller than the hard drives. A memory chip is solid-state storage or has no moving parts; therefore, these flash drives are less likely to fail. Due to very small chip size, the flash drives are virtually weightless and have the ability to retain data even without a power supply. These drives are faster than even the fastest mechanical hard drives, as they do not generate significant heat & unwanted power to run. Like mechanical hard drives, Flash drives have no mechanical limitation in order to access a file, and need nanosecond seeks time rather than the milliseconds required by a normal hard drive.

A flash memory can be a good concept in order to extend the life of a laptop or other electronic device batteries. There are a number of flash devices available, such as memory sticks, flash cards, etc. used in various digital devices for storage purposes.

Flash Innovation: Flash Based memory concept was firstly introduced by Toshiba in 1984. A flash memory is a form of EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory). Currently, there are two main types of flash memory available, one is the NAND logic gate and the other is NOR logic gate. The internal characteristics of an individual flash memory cell are dependent upon the corresponding gates.

NOR Flash: NOR based flash offers memory addressing on a byte scale that enables random access with a great read speed. The concept of NOR-based flash is comparatively more expensive than NAND, as it takes larger individual cell size. NOR has slower erase and write speed, but it provides full address and data buses, therefore, it could be a great replacement of EEPROM or ROM-based chips, where the addressability and read speed is more important than the rewriting durability. NOR-based flash was the earlier concept of flash-based removable media, which was later replaced by a less expensive NAND flash.

NAND Flash: NAND based flash reduced the limitations of NOR flash and came with a great write speed and durability, which required less chip area per cell. Due to this, NAND allows greater storage density and lower cost per GB than NOR flash.  NAND is available in single-level cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC) forms, including enterprise MLC (eMLC), TLC, due to which is it faster and provides a good storage capacity. However, NAND flash read data on the basis of block-wise and doesn’t provide a random-access external address bus, which makes it unsuitable for ROM memory. Basically, NAND flash is like other secondary storage devices, such as hard disk and optical media, and used for mass-storage devices.

Flash memory Interface:

Flash storage memory is available in a number of interfaces, like USB, SATA, M.2, and PCIe. USB 3 is popular for portable OS drives. Where SATA 3Gb and 6Gb are common on desktops and notebook computers, as to provide speed beyond 500MB/s. PCIe and M.2 represent the end of speed-demanding solutions, at 985MB/s and 1969MB/s respectively.

Almost all the Data centres use Flash-based storage devices, as they always keep looking for an efficient and cost-effective way of storage. Flash storage has a powerful concept in order to achieve green computing or green data centre benchmarks. Due to which, almost every big organization has opted flash drive or even a flash RAID array for those applications, which needs a lot of erasing. Therefore, multiple big companies are now entering the flash storage market.

With the growing interest of flash storage in the market, the industry should also be concern about warnings with flash. With the high speed and random read access, flash is also prone to data loss or corruption issues in heavy use. This is due to its relatively limited tolerance for write-erase cycles. Manufacturers should provide flash storage with better performance, but always keep reliability as the priority.

However, even then disaster can happen with the data stored in flash storage devices, you can always come to Stellar Data Recovery Service and recover your lost, deleted or corrupt data from both logically and physically damaged flash device.