Originally Posted by robertbartsch
Would anyone like to speculate on how these boxes survived in 10,000 feet of water for so long? I would have thought the pressure alone at that depth would have made this unlikely.
As noted it is designed to withstand even greater depths. It is a multi-layer package of very strong materials. It may have some electronics within that pressure vessel package. All the electronics on the outside would be toast. But the contents of that pressure vessel, as long as it is not breached by an impact during the crash, should be OK.
The description given of reading the device indicated they mounted it on a new set of electronics and discovered it was fully readable. I am not sure if that is the "memory chips" were remounted in a new Solid State Disk package with its electronics or whether they just used the pigtail sticking out of the package to connect to the new external electronics box is not 100% clear. I am inclined to believe the latter hypothesis given that it came together remarkably quickly.
I did notice that the pigtail that connects to the larger electronics package appeared to have disconnected cleanly in the one case and was still connected in the other. So both should have been in useful condition for simply plugging it into a new box and proceeding. I'm not sure if they even bothered to open the cylinder to visually check the contents. I would probably have done that before applying power and risking there being water inside.