One of the few things that all mobile devices have in common is the choice of the type of internal storage. All Apple smartphones and tablets, most Android devices since Android 2.3 Gingerbread, all BlackBerry 10 smartphones, Windows Phone 8, Windows RT, and a lot of Windows 8/8.1 tablets use eMMC chips as their storage.
eMMC stands for embedded MMC, or embedded MultiMedia Card. To put it simply, eMMC is a non-removable memory card that is soldered onto a circuit board. Unlike plain flash memory chips, the eMMC standard uses a combination of NAND modules and an integrated storage controller built into a single chip. It is the storage controller that makes things so different to traditional storage media when it comes to recovering deleted information.
In broad general terms, the embedded storage controller takes care of all the reading and writing operations. In addition (and this is the important part), the eMMC specification defines a number of maintenance routines...