When your hard drive electronics dies you can ship your hard drive to a recovery company and for some serious dollars they will connect your spinning disks to known good electronics and retrieve your data. That’s fine when your drive electronics are mounted on a removable PCB in a large chassis. Now think of the same issue when talking about the embedded system inside an SD card which handles the reading and writing operations between the NAND flash and the outside world. The size of the device makes this a challenging problem. Joshua Wise was forced to look into this issue when his SD card was accidentally smashed. Interfacing with the flash was just one of the hurdles, the first issue was physically connecting to the pins on the damaged device. One of those great Schmart boards came to the rescue for that. Joshua wrote a number of programs to assist him to interface with the flash.
Via: Electronics Lab