Dismantling a Low Profile USB Flash Drive

Covering the Lexar S45's LED and seeing how it can be so small

I was looking to buy a new USB flash drive for playing music in my car and was amazed to see that flash drives could be made so small and at capacities up to 128GB at the same size at an affordable price, even with USB 3. I ordered a 16GB Lexar S45 for the car, and to open up and investigate for cheap.

This USB flash drive has a bright blue LED that flashes during I/O activity. I wanted to cover this since I'd be using it in my car, and it'd be very annoying at night, or even the day. I thought covering up the outside wasn't a clean or foolproof solution, so I decided to open it up and cover the LED itself.

The plastic cover has two tabs that are snapped into two holes on the narrow sides of the metal USB casing. I pushed the tip of a knife between the plastic and metal and pried them apart enough to pull one side of the plastic out. The other side was then easy to pull out.

The entire chip and USB plug slide out from the opposite side of the plug.

It seems that the full size of the USB flash drive is that of the NAND chip, even the plug. Interestingly it seems everything is soldered right onto the chip. I tried searching the numbers I found on the back of the chip but got no results.

After pulling up some macro photos that were taken at an angle, I noticed that there seemed to be traces going between the USB pins and the LED. This NAND chip is probably actually a NAND and a controller in a single package which is pretty cool.

Since I didn't want to break this chip this was the extent of my investigation. So I turned to fixing my issue of having the overly bright LED. I considered de-soldering the LED but it was a tiny SMD right on the NAND which I was afraid of melting, so I went with just taping over the LED.

I put everything back together and plugged in. It still worked and there was no trace of any LED light coming through.