Dead.

It was bound to happen some day. I had some documents with me on an USB stick and when I come bad home it doesn't work anymore. Not even a blib. Completely dead.

Damn. That was my favorite USB stick, size and shape were close to perfect; not too small to get lost, not too bulky to cause problems when using or carrying it. Oh well. Time to go shopping again.

 

Fortunately there wasn't anything that critical on it so loss isn't that big deal. I didn't really have any expectations about recovering it but I cracked it open anyway, primarily to see what's inside.

As it turns out, not much. Other size of the PCB is fully taken by single 64Gbit  (8 GByte) flash chip, other side has controller (SM321QF - based on quick googling not very trustworhy chip), crystal and some passives. Measurement only confirmed what I expected, that is, it's dead, for good.

The other stick above it is one that I have used in car player, here only for reference. It's perfect there - small form factor, doesn't stick out from radio's front panel and doesn't draw wrong kind of attention (although who in his right mind would bother to steal El Cheapo-brand car player anyway...).
What I'm more amazed is how they have managed to fit same 8Gbytes of memory on such a small space, comparing to one below. I kinda suspect the size is "bought" with high cost of long-time reliability, so even more reason not to use it for anything critical. We'll see when it dies...

Oh, and when I said there wasn't anything critical on dead stick I lied a bit. There wasn't anything critical in sense of "data I can't afford to lose". There was some stuff in sense of "documents I don't want to get to wrong hands".

I'm pretty sure that now it's unrecoverable enough.