I have had some (little) experience reflashing the controller in some older USB flash sticks. Now the controller in my own flash stick (JMF601) has apparently lost its firmware. Looking this up on the web, it appears that those particular chips are indeed unreliable. This is the controller used in the OCZ Throttle series (flash drives) and Transcend TS32GSSD18M-M portable SSDs.
Well, if ANYBODY has any idea of where to get the tool to re-program the controller of the device through USB, that would save me a ton of hassle (while also rescuing my data). Maybe @wendell has a better clue of where we actually get those
EDIT: I should say that while searching for it, I did found a person talking about the same thing here:
http://sourceforge.net/p/smartmontools/mailman/message/31867378/
However the links are either dead, or are pointing to malicious Chinese crap. Looking for some better alternatives.