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If you've been watching the news, you know why I'm asking this.

For reasons not yet known, flight 370 from Kuala Lampur left its planned flight path to Beijing, and flew for hours before (probably) crashing in the southern Indian Ocean. If the passengers or crew were alive and aware of problems, they might have had time to leave messages or record events with their electronic devices.

So I'm wondering: how tough is that memory? Can it be recovered using advanced forensic techniques, like those that sometimes recover data from destroyed or erased magnetic hard drives?

Renan
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Rob N
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    It is very hard to destroy the memory in flash- I would expect it could all be recovered if there was enough interest. It might cost some thousands of dollars per phone for the labor. Salt water (plus battery power) will cause most of the damage, and 6" is (almost) as bad as 10,000 feet. – Spehro Pefhany Mar 25 '14 at 18:49
  • The chips themselves will be fine, probably for months. Each phone would have to be disassembled and the flash chip(s) removed from the PCB and placed in a test fixture of some sort for readout. It might require decapuslation of the die itself, but I doubt it. – Dave Tweed Mar 25 '14 at 19:14
  • It's a tragedy and I hope that those who perished will have left messages for their loved ones but I don't suppose there will have been testing done on memory cards to that extent so nobody will know until they are recovered. In normal circumstances I'd vote to close but as an insignificant mark of respect to those who have lost family and friends it doesn't seem appropriate to do so. – Andy aka Mar 25 '14 at 19:15
  • I say that it would live, because once my flash drive was in glue and it lived. – Sam Brown Mar 25 '14 at 19:16
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    Silicon is actually pretty tough. Many years ago, General Dynamics/Fort Worth was investigating an F-16 crash. The airplane had a new semiconductor-memory-based all-digital flight recorder. The case was smashed in the crash. The boards were smashed. The ICs were smashed. The IC dice inside the ICs were intact ENOUGH that GD/FW was able to probe the dice, using very specialized test gear, recover the data, and figure out why the airplane went down. – John R. Strohm Mar 26 '14 at 03:45

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Yes, but they will degrade over time. The silicon die itself inside its protective plastic or epoxy package will be fine until the seawater eats away the pins and water actually gets access to the die itself. Even then it may be possible depending on a number of factors.

The pins, however, might corrode in a way that stops further seawater ingress to the die. If that happens they may last for years or decades.

I expect that, should they be recovered in a year, there will be some small percentage of mobile devices that, with careful techniques, will have recoverable data on them.

Adam Davis
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