Thread: EFiX™ autopsy / disassembled

Edit: 10-Sep-2009 18:58. Removed due to legal reasons. Sorry

Congratulations :-) You beat me up to it :-)

Looks like nothing out of the extraordinary there. Just some kind of plain flash storage device.

Great Work....I believe it is pretty much what everyone expected. A USB stick. Nothing special at all. But, an excellent job getting it apart and leaving the circuit intact.

So....which part of the circuit is the "really intricate hardware protection" I seem to remember from their FAQ's?

That would be .. the plastic casing maybe ? ;-)

These guys are paranoid. Scratching out serial numbers? Lasering off part numbers?

Ridiculous.

It's depressing--paid more for a glorified USB stick than either for the CPU with tens of millions of transistors and on-die cache memory or for a motherboard with infinitely more circuit complexity or for a GPU with millions of transistors and 1 GB of onboard memory. Even Apple puts $170 of parts in its $300 (?) iPhone GS.
ASEM puts in $10 of parts and charges $250? OK. so there are no economies of scale for ASEM and they have the so-called "hundreds" of programmers to pay, but $250 for $10 in parts smells of something that isn't roses.
BTW, did you read that the new 4.6.12 firmware brings back the LAN but kills TimeMachine and a few other things again.

I think this thread save me from putting more money which will be useless on sending that stupid efix back to Taiwan for repair. It's quite a shame for them, and I will wait and see what will happen.

Edit: 10-Sep-2009 18:59. Removed due to legal reasons. Sorry

Yes, that would be interesting. I was unable to dump the content under linux. I need to try to plug it after the machine started to see if there is any difference.

Edit: 10-Sep-2009 19:00. Removed due to legal reasons. Sorry