Flash Drive What’s Inside
Here is what’s inside a flash drive with integral parts labeled in the photo. The particular USB flash drive shown has the controller and all the components on the pcb (printed circuit board) unlike the monolith usb flash drive which has everything on the silicon die substrate.
- Controller – This is the most important part of the flash drive other than the actual NAND memory chip. It is also the most prone to failure. The controller IC (Integrated Circuit) acts as the conduit between the users computer and the NAND memory chip. It is responsible for all the operations in communicating with the users computer transferring data to and from the NAND memory chip. The controller is also responsible for all the data manipulations that occur to the data as it is placed inside the NAND memory chip.
- Oscillator – This IC is what interacts with the controller and provides an exact clock cycle usually 12.0MHz to keep the controller in sync and operational. Sometimes contained within the controller but in the case shown above is its own independant IC.
- Bus – This is the actual pipeline so to speak where current and voltage travels along pathways (busses) in the form of data, power, and clock signals connecting all the components of the circuit board
- Resistor – These are generally used in flash drive PCB’s (printed circuit boards) to provide stablitiy of the various signals and also to decrease current and voltage to specific parameters for functionality of the various components on the PCB.
- Capacitor – Capacitors are used on USB flash drive pcb’s for smoothing the output of power from the computers USB port and keeping the data, oscillator and power signals clean.
- NAND Memory Chip – This is the single most important part of the USB Flash Drive. This is the actual IC (Integrated Circuit) that stores all the data. Since the NAND Memory chip is at the end of the chain in terms of its architecture, the pcb, components and controller are what generally sustain the damage and usually the memory IC stays intact with the possiblity of recovering the original data.