Our “unbreakable” flash USB memory from Corsair, Flash Voyager, simply broke, as you can see on the pictures below. How? We hit it by accident with our chair while it was plugged to our desktop. It happened to us, so it can happen to you. In this tutorial we are going to show you how we were able to recover the data stored inside this broken USB flash memory.

So, this USB flash memory is not so robust as it looks like and as Corsair claims. Even tough it is water and shock resistant, we found out that this “shock resistance” is only regarding free falls. If you push it hard enough while it is connected to your PC, it will break, as it happened to us.

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Figure 1: Our Corsair Flash Voyager memory is broken!

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Figure 2: Our broken USB memory.

So, what to do? Of course we had important data stored inside this memory that we didn’t have backup (Murphy’s Law, of course), so we are more worried about recovering the data than calling Corsair to check if their warranty covers this (by the way, Corsair's warranty doesn't cover this, since it is a physical damage).

Since it was the USB plug that broke, we decided to open the drive and solder a regular USB cable to it. We used a pair of scissors to cut off its rubber cover.

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Figure 3: Our broken USB flash memory without its rubber cover.

Opening it we could understand why it broke. We put the connector back on its original position and we think that there is a huge gap between the printed circuit board (PCB) and the connector (see red arrow on Figure 4), which allows the connector to bend and break. Maybe by removing this gap or by fastening the PCB to the two sides of the connector could solve this issue.

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Figure 4: Why it broke.

Let’s now see how we recovered our data.