NAND flash, the same memory chips found in everything from USB thumb drives to very expensive solid state disk drives, are increasingly common. As they (partially) serve as the storage for cellphones, Wiis, routers and just about every piece of consumer electronic devices, you’re probably surrounded by dozens of NAND chips at any one time.

[Sprite_tm], hacker extraordinaire, put up a build a few years ago where he was able to read the contents of NAND Flash chips using a PC parallel port. It’s getting rather hard to find a parallel port on a PC anymore, so he updated his build to read Flash chips off of a USB port.

There are two main components of [Sprite_tm]’s build. First, to read the Flash chip, he needed a way to break out the pins on the very tiny TSOP48 package. [Sprite] found a neat little socket for these chips on eBay for about 10 Euros.

Communicating with the Flash chip via USB was a little harder. [Sprite] knew he needed USB 2.0, but not many microcontrollers have that implemented. Luckily, the FTDI FT2232H has USB 2.0, along with the very nice feature of being able to read data and address pins directly from the Flash chip. After a bit of soldering, [Sprite_tm] was left with the device seen above.

[Sprite_tm] found a nice library to bitbang the pins on the FTDI chip and request one page of memory from the Flash chip at a time. The device works as advertised, but it’s still a bit slow at 250 kBps. [Sprite] figures he can increase the speed of reading a Flash chip by requesting multiple pages at a time, but it’s still orders of magnitude faster than the old parallel port solution.

There’s a good bit of software [Sprite] posted to help him (and possibly others) read bare NAND flash chips via USB. This means if you have a broken USB Flash drive or SD card, it’s possible to desolder the chip and read it with your own controller. Interpreting the blocks of data recovered from a Flash drive as a file system is another story, but it’s still a fairly remarkable build.