Bit Error Analysis of Drives Submitted for Data Recovery

Flash media provides many challenges for data recovery personnel, including the ECC (Error Correction Coding) that is implemented within. The ECC technique uses finite fields and their properties to detect and correct a finite number of bit errors in a group of bits. This group of bits for flash media is usually a sector of data bytes, which was usually 512 bytes plus several meta-data bytes, but has been evolving. The data bytes with the associated parity bytes together constitute what is termed a “codeword” or CW. Early flash media devices submitted for data recovery used Reed-Solomon (an ECC method…