Is it true data recovery from broken NAND chips is impossible?
Executive summary
It is not categorically impossible to recover data from broken NAND chips, but in practice a hairline crack or severe physical damage usually makes reliable recovery effectively impossible for most labs and consumers; specialized research tools and forensic techniques can sometimes extract information but are expensive, destructive, or limited in scope [1] [2] [3]. The real-world truth is nuance: manufacturers’ encryption, 3D NAND complexity, and charge-loss after damage create barriers that often place recovery beyond practical reach [4] [5] [6].
1. Why many experts say “impossible” — physical damage and charge loss
When a NAND die is cracked or thermally stressed, the tiny charge states that encode bits leak or are altered, and simply powering the device can push currents across damaged transistors and destroy residual data; recovery firms therefore often decline cracked-chip cases because the damage commonly renders data uncorrectable [1] [2] [3]. Academic testing shows thermal chip removal can increase errors by orders of magnitude, making most data uncorrectable unless the chip was lightly used and special read tactics are available [2].
2. What “chip-off” and direct reads actually accomplish — and their limits
Chip-off recovery—physically desoldering NAND and reading raw dumps—works for many hardware faults where the controller is dead but the die is intact; however, raw dumps are hard to interpret because of proprietary translation layers, ECC, and interleaving, and the process itself can introduce additional errors or be impractical for complex SSDs and stacked 3D NAND architectures [7] [8] [9] [10] [5]. Some recovery houses advertise high success rates for particular scenarios, but those claims depend on the failure mode, device type, and access to firmware mappings [11] [12].
3. Cutting-edge forensics: SKPM and analog read techniques — promising but limited
Research tools like Scanning Kelvin Probe Microscopy (SKPM) can examine charge distributions on transistors and, in principle, reconstruct stored bits without applying voltages that would destroy them; these methods show promise for forensic recovery but are extremely slow, costly, and currently limited to lab-scale experiments rather than routine service work [1]. USENIX and other research demonstrate that analog properties and retention effects can be exploited to recover “scrubbed” or partially erased data, but those results depend on controlled lab conditions and specific chip behaviors [4].
4. Encryption and manufacturer defenses that make recovery effectively impossible
Even if raw cell charges survive and can be read, many consumer devices tie NAND contents to a device-specific cryptographic key in the SoC; copying the NAND to another board without the original CPU/secure element leaves the raw data encrypted and unreadable—an obstacle regularly cited in smartphone repair forums and recovery cases such as iPhones with AES hardware encryption [6]. This means physical recovery of unencrypted user data is often blocked by design, not just by damage.
5. Commercial incentives, marketing, and realistic expectations
Data-recovery vendors and labs have incentives to advertise high success on solvable cases while steering clients away from hopeless ones; promotional language about “recovering from virtually any device” should be read against peer-reviewed findings that chip-off and thermal removal can be destructive and that success rates vary widely by chip type and damage severity [12] [2] [11]. Consumers should expect an evaluation and honest limits: logical failures are routinely recoverable, severe physical cracks usually are not, and rare forensic methods exist but at high cost and low guarantee [7] [1].
6. Bottom line — conditional impossibility, not an absolute one
Broken NAND chips are often irretrievable in practice: a cracked die, thermal stress, or powering a damaged chip typically destroys the analog states that encode data, and encryption can make any surviving dump useless without the original key [1] [2] [6]. However, a narrowly defined set of advanced forensic techniques and careful chip-off procedures have retrieved data in research or specialized lab settings—meaning “impossible” is too strong a blanket statement, but for most users and recovery providers a cracked NAND chip is effectively unrecoverable [1] [4] [10].