The lab received a USB stick that had been drilled into using a power drill so the customer could make the USB into a key chain. The power drill had drilled through the casing and actually caught the PCB and the edge of the NAND chip damaging its pins (legs).
The NAND chip is what we refer to as flash memory which is where the data is stored, possibly the worse part of a USB you could drill into!
However luckily majority of NAND chip devices have unused pins on the chip, and the customer had only damaged the unused pins! This meant the data and the integrity of the data was 100% and a full recovery was done.
Phew! I’m sure a lesson was learnt.
