Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/microsd-cards/tragic-oceangate-titan-submersibles-usd62-sandisk-memory-card-found-undamaged-at-wreckage-site-12-stills-and-nine-videos-have-been-recovered-but-none-from-the-fateful-implosion

by WithinReason • 9 months ago

428 213 9 months ago

tomshardware.com

asimovDev• 9 months ago

is this a common setup to have the camera store to external storage device without storing to the SD card as well?

malux85• 9 months ago

Yes because external storage is much larger, and theres nothing more annoying than being in the middle of doing some science with 30 other bits of complex equipment, and then the camera stops working with storage full errors and youre 7000m underwater in a cramped sub trying to navigate a camera UI to find the setting.

Configure your systems so they are in the configuration that is less likely to cause random disruption in the field.

3eb7988a16632• 9 months ago

Which makes me wonder why they bother with the SD card at all. What was it meant to be storing? If it is not intended to be the real storage area, why not just have it in a loop, constantly over-writing the oldest material?

intothemild• 9 months ago

It continues to amaze me how indestructible SDCards are.

imploded_sub• 9 months ago

It wasn't in the crushed part, it was in the camera's shell, and the camera was mounted outside, if I understood properly.

netsharc• 9 months ago

And:

This still and video camera is rated to withstand depths up to 6,000m (19,685 feet, 3,281 fathoms)

Unlike the Titan sub...

3eb7988a16632• 9 months ago

The picture looks like the camera + storage SD card were in a sealed metal tube that was untouched.

gompertz• 9 months ago

It also amazes me how incredibly unbrowseable tomshardware is now with all the ads and pop-ups.

haunter2• 9 months ago

It also amazes me that people are using the internet w/o an adblocker in the year 2025

pwg• 9 months ago

With UblockOrigin blocking the ads, there were no ads and pop-ups.

gruez• 9 months ago

It's a solid piece of silicon encased in epoxy, so there's nothing really to get crushed. Contrast this to something like a cellphone that's made of hundreds of separate parts and has void space that will get crushed.

amelius6• 9 months ago

Why isn't a cellphone filled with epoxy?

pfdietz2• 9 months ago

This comment made me wonder how much easier proximity fuzes would have been to develop in WW2 had they had transistors (or integrated circuits). I assume making modern solid state electronics 20,000g shock resistant is much easier than doing the same to vacuum tubes.

dylan604• 9 months ago

So that's the next phase of making devices thinner? /s

chrsw• 9 months ago

Are consumer grade cards really reliable though? Not so much against physical damage, but of data integrity over extended periods? "Industrial" SD cards can be 10 times or 100 times more expensive than consumer grade cards.

MBCook4• 9 months ago

So were the flash chips on the SSDs they found. It didn’t save them.

hinkley3• 9 months ago

Say for argument’s sake there was a small air bubble in the resin. Couldn’t that result in cavitation?

stefan_• 9 months ago

The SDCard that was in another sub, properly constructed from titanium not carbon. The sub housed a camera, no humans.

userbinator3• 9 months ago

Heat and wear are the greatest dangers to flash memory, and this was found in a cold dark place, with presumably plenty of life remaining.

reaperducer• 9 months ago

It continues to amaze me how indestructible SDCards are.

Until they're sold as supplemental hard drives (cough Transcend Jetdrive cough). Then they'll fail if you even look at them strangely.

Gigachad2• 9 months ago

Put one in a Raspberry pi and it will be dead in a month.

jonas21• 9 months ago

The NTSB's original report has more detail on how the SD Card was encrypted and how the NTSB managed to decrypt it:

https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&Fi...

jeffrallen• 9 months ago

Does not leave SubC in a particularly flattering light...

Aurornis2• 9 months ago

They had no idea how their own product worked. They didn’t even know it used encrypted storage.

This was either outsourced or done by some junior engineer who was putting pieces together like it was another Raspberry Pi project that just needed to kind of work.

Symbiote• 9 months ago

It survived the pressure, does the rest matter?

mk_stjames• 9 months ago

The System on Module board is an Inforce 6601 SOM. [0]

It uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and they provide prebuilt Ubuntu Linaro distros for it, preconfigured for the board.

The camera manufacturer likely just tossed it straight in as configured and thus didn't know how the full disk encryption was setup.

This whole camera design looks like one of those 'we gave this project to some undergrad engineering students who've never designed a commercial product before and had no price target and thus it has a whole damn embedded linux system inside it for merely taking some HD video and stills triggered by some external wiring and saving them to an SD card'.

See also: almost any specialty medical electronic device ever manufactured.

[0] https://linuxgizmos.com/tiny-rugged-com-runs-linux-or-androi...

Interesco• 9 months ago

The 3D-printed (and hot glued?) part in Figure 3 further support this theory (not that 3D prints can't be used in production).

userbinator3• 9 months ago

Indeed this is massively overcomplicated, as one only needs to see what dashcams use to know that you don't need, or perhaps want, an entire OS on it.

Neywiny• 9 months ago

I'll admit I only watched a video on it not the report, but it had pictures reportedly redacted at manufacturer request. It showed a teensy 3 and some adafruit qwiic board in there. Obviously the real engineering is in the enclosure. Otherwise it could just be a webcam. But still, it's clearly not a very in depth electrical design. I'm all for SoMs if you can but they don't guarantee you the adventure of custom hardware bringing moving through all the software stacks and whatnot.

StopDisinfo910• 9 months ago

This whole camera design looks like one of those 'we gave this project to some undergrad engineering students who've never designed a commercial product before and had no price target and thus it has a whole damn embedded linux system inside it for merely taking some HD video and stills triggered by some external wiring and saving them to an SD card'.
See also: almost any specialty medical electronic device ever manufactured.

These are not design mistakes.

When building products in short runs and where the costs of part have little impact on your margins compared to R&D, it completely makes sense to go for a full computer rather than bother with embedded development where everything is more complicated. Medical also has to deal with certification which is a much more significant concern than saving on parts and will often reuse already certified components.

Hamuko• 9 months ago

But how did anyone figure out it was a SanDisk SD card? Card details were redacted.

Macha• 9 months ago

There's only 3 manufacturers of SD cards in any volume, you can compare the branding and font choices and see who's it is.

serf• 9 months ago

SanDisk is one of the big three on SD-3C/SD Association.. so kinda regardless of the MFG it's 'one of theirs' in a roundabout way.

matja• 9 months ago

Presumably because it looks identical to a Sandisk extreme pro 512gb, with grey boxes drawn over the logo.

MBCook4• 9 months ago

The report has a heavily redacted interview with a submarine expert. Who directed Titanic and The Abyss.

They’re not good at redacting.

siliconunit• 9 months ago

also basically if enough companies agrees on helping the cause your crypto secrets are quite more likely to be exposed...

yread• 9 months ago

Isnt the weakness here that there was nothing encrypting the actual key? On a laptop luks key stored in a tpm would usually be encrypted using your passphrase

XorNot• 9 months ago

The NTSB report noted that if the TrustZone secure enclave system was being used, then yeah this data would be toast.

But it speaks more to Oceangstrs negligence that this situation even existed: why wasn't any potential encryption keys escrowed ashore to ensure they could be recovered later? This shouldn't have even been an issue.

dmix• 9 months ago

Since not everyone reads articles:

Somewhat disappointingly, the images and videos shared in the report were taken in the vicinity of the ROV shop at the Marine Institute, also in Newfoundland. The location was the logistical base for Titanic dive missions. No deep-sea shenanigans around the Titanic wreck were revealed.

withinboredom3• 9 months ago

Wouldn’t it have been streaming it to disk without creating the file? Kinda like how if your camera dies while it’s recording, there is no recording. You have to manually recreate the file.

MBCook4• 9 months ago

I think that’s what they think. It was being recorded by the onboard PC to its SSDs, which were completely destroyed in the implosion.

RandomBK2• 9 months ago

I see a lot of discussion in this thread stemming from some confusion+not reading the actual report[0].

Some key points:

1. The Camera+Card was encased in a separate enclosure made of titanium+sapphire, and did not seem to be exposed to extreme pressures.

2. The encryption was done via a variant of LUKS/dm-crypt, with the key stored on the NVRAM of a chip (Edited; not in TrustZone).

3. The recovery was done by transplanting the original chip onto a new working board. No manufacturer backdoors or other hidden mechanisms were used.

4. Interestingly, the camera vendor didn't seem to realize there was any encryption at all.

[0] https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=18741602&Fi...

nxobject• 9 months ago

If the encryption was that easy to bypass, was it worth it at all?

anakaine• 9 months ago

Sure. If the card was recovered without the camera motherboard then the decryption key would not have been recovered.

trenchpilgrim3• 9 months ago

Stealing a camera is much harder than stealing an SD card out of a camera.

phire• 9 months ago

The manufacturer didn’t even know encryption was enabled, because as long as the camera was working, it would just provide all files over USB without any encryption.

It was basically enabled by accident, and the only thing it prevented was recovery of files directly from the SD card when the camera was damaged.

astrange3• 9 months ago

There are some reasons you'd want to encrypt even without a secret key. One is it makes it easier to erase data (just erase the key).

It also makes bit flip errors a lot more obvious, which is another way of saying harder to ignore, so that can go either way.

Keeblo• 9 months ago

Unless I misread the article, the key was stored in the NVRAM and not the TrustZone.

IIRC, the article stated that if the key(s) had been stored in the TrustZone then the data would have been irrecoverable.

RandomBK2• 9 months ago

Good catch; it was somewhat ambiguous in the report.

Fnoord• 9 months ago

0. They were too cheap to use an industrial grade SD. Mind boggling.

jychang• 9 months ago

If you read the article, the SD card was placed there by the camera manufacturer and then the device was sealed so it would withstand pressure, and then sold to divers. Blame the camera manufacturer's engineers.

Seems like the SD card of all things performed just fine, so it hardly seems like the weak point.

blablabla123• 9 months ago

1. The Camera+Card was encased in a separate enclosure made of titanium+sapphire, and did not seem to be exposed to extreme pressures.

I wonder what the price of the enclosure was then. Feels a bit like click bait...

spacecadet• 9 months ago

Alot. Just google cameras for deep sea and space. Several companies make these and despite all the covering up, none of the tech is that special.

squigz2• 9 months ago

Clickbait? Where? How? It's literally in the NTSB report, and it's not like, a crazy concept?

rtkwe2• 9 months ago

It might have been filled with mineral oil, those external enclosures often setup that way so that the enclosure is less extreme to manufacture. Not sure if that would work for camera lenses though unless those were also filled.

two_handfuls• 9 months ago

What I also learned from this article is that Scott Manley is still on Twitter.

MBCook4• 9 months ago

Scott Manley’s 45 minute video covering the NTSB report this information comes from went up today, it’s quite interesting.

https://youtu.be/qMUjCZ7MMWQ

Vexs• 9 months ago

Figure 3 from the report- that's an Adafruit sensor module on a 3d printed bit of plastic with a teensy-brand microcontroller just sitting in there! Actually, the entire electronics enclosure appears printed.

Very funny to see in what I assume is a million-dollar product.

hinkley3• 9 months ago

What was the water condensation situation like in this submarine? Semi bare electronics sounds very very bad.

MengerSponge2• 9 months ago

Any money spent coating those semi-bare electronics would have been wasted. There's an engineering lesson to be taught here, I'm sure.

progbits3• 9 months ago

This is a camera outside the sub, and the electronics are inside sealed enclosure. If that had any leak for water to get in some conformal coating isn't going to save you, it will get pancaked.

Of course random arduino module and teensy used for product is amateur hour, even for low volume production. They must have crazy margins on that camera and producing custom board is very cheap.

MengerSponge2• 9 months ago

On-brand, though. And speak some respect to Adafruit's name! Lady Ada's product isn't what failed.

blueflow• 9 months ago

Lol, and the censored controller is a teensy 3.2

Buttons840• 9 months ago

If a hardened camera can survive, I'm surprised subs don't have a floating black box that can survive an implosion and then float to the surface and begin emitting a radio signal.

I guess the trick would be finding a way to securely attach the black box in a way that would ensure its release in a catastrophic disaster.

bamboozled2• 9 months ago

I guess he wasn’t planning for a catastrophic failure ?

hinkley3• 9 months ago

He ridiculed anyone who told him he should, taking it as evidence that he was disrupting an industry.

There is something slightly romantic about dying in such a way that his body turned to mist and floated away in the current. A bit like having your ashes spread at sea. With fewer steps.

jopsen• 9 months ago

Probably commerical subs aren't a common thing with lots of regulation.

Just guessing here? :)

ceejayoz• 9 months ago

The ones that aren’t accompanied by a surface ship are military, and they really don’t want anything that might automatically deploy at the wrong moment.

waste_monk• 9 months ago

This was part of what complicated the response to the Kursk disaster - they had a rescue buoy but it was welded in place so it couldn't deploy.

foxglacier• 9 months ago

There are a zillion applications for black-boxes, so why not start somewhere more accessible and with more impact? Your own house, car, and person, for instance. Think of how many elderly people die at home and nobody knows the details leading up to it. I'm being a bit facetious here - perhaps we don't need to know in those cases, nor in the Titan case. It's not as if there could be any data there which advances submarine safety - unless somebody is planning to build a Titan v2 with the same technology, marginally improved safety, and similar lack of testing?

gambiting4• 9 months ago

Just fyi - if your car has been manufactured in the last 10 years by a modern corporation(ie - not a Lada) it will have a black box already that records everything about the car's systems. They don't record sound from the cabin, but your speed, throttle position, movement of the steering wheel - it's all recorded.

dkbrk• 9 months ago

I'm not aware of anything quite like that, but most submarines have something like a Rescue Buoy [0], Submarine Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon (SEPIRB) or Submarine Emergency Communications Transmitter (SECT). I think those might differ based on whether they're attached by a cable and allow communicating to the submarine, or just broadcast a distress signal with the position. In any case, they're designed to be automatically deployed in the event of an emergency or catastrophic event, and based on this Quora answer [1] they're attached by an independent mechanism with a timer which has to be regularly reset to stop it deploying. I think it might be a clockwork mechanism, with an electronic alarm when it's about to go off to remind the crew to wind it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_buoy_(submarine)

[1] https://www.quora.com/Don%E2%80%99t-submarines-have-communic...

baking• 9 months ago

There were glass spheres outside the main pressure vessel containing electronics and filled with mineral oil that were damaged during the implosion, but the electronics survived mostly intact. This probably would have been a good option for a "black box" recorder. Scott Manley discusses the spheres in his video.

TZubiri• 9 months ago

It might be advertising, but I'll allow it because it's so metal

rdtsc• 9 months ago

No deep-sea shenanigans around the Titanic wreck were revealed. Manley explains in his Twitter thread that “the camera had been configured to dump data onto an external storage device, so nothing was found from the accident dive.” Nothing particularly pertinent to the tragic accident, that is.

This is about camera hardware and how it survived. It provides no information or footage about the incident (in case you were looking for it like I was).

boppo1• 9 months ago

Thank you, this post saved me time.

alwahi• 9 months ago

but what about the Logitech controller?

34679• 9 months ago

Dear Tom's Hardware,

Tech users get upset when you make me do what you want instead of what the user wants.

Sincerely,

The Back Button

eth0up• 9 months ago

Them sandisks need to be pretty tough to not vaporize whilst cooking your USB ports. Ever notice how infernally hot they get under large file transfers?

Completely killed one of my ports after 50gbs

atum47• 9 months ago

Is the memory card actually more expensive than the controller?

pinkmuffinere• 9 months ago

I know the default policy is to use the source headline, but I feel the mention of $62 is kindof unfair. It evokes cheapness. Many many aspects of the craft were cheap and underbuilt, but it’s not clear to me that the memory card was one of those areas. Seems like it was an actually useful COTS part

everforward• 9 months ago

Yeah, and the title doesn't mention that is for a camera either.

This seems perfectly reasonable for camera data storage, and apparently a camera that's manually operated as well.

It'd be worrying if it was storing the binaries to operate the sub, but this is a decent quality SD card for camera storage.

bArray• 9 months ago

(Image credit: Scott Manley, David Case at the NTSB)

Why are they crediting Scott Manley instead of just grabbing the images from the reports themselves? It sounds to me as if they wrote an article based on the video, and not based on the report. Very lazy journalism.

Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site

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