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#1
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Dumb question
I have recently had a Windows XP computer that I replaced with a Windows
8.1 computer. I scrubbed the disk with a disk eraser. Question: If I were to scrub a thumb drive or flash card, does it need the multipass cleaning that a hard drive would require? Thumb drive/flashcard stores in is chip memory, "and/or" gates. It seems like once the gate was change there would be no residual properties to remove. A hard drive stores by changing the surface properties of the disk. |
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#2
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Dumb question
Keith Nuttle wrote:
I have recently had a Windows XP computer that I replaced with a Windows 8.1 computer. I scrubbed the disk with a disk eraser. Question: If I were to scrub a thumb drive or flash card, does it need the multipass cleaning that a hard drive would require? Thumb drive/flashcard stores in is chip memory, "and/or" gates. It seems like once the gate was change there would be no residual properties to remove. A hard drive stores by changing the surface properties of the disk. The flash device does not use magnetism and doesn't have a fringing field to worry about. A single pass should take care of it. Using Guttman erasure for that, would be a waste of write life on the storage device. If blocks of flash memory get spared out, those old blocks may not get erased. And while an SSD has "Enhanced Secure Erase" as a means to try to erase them, I don't think the USB flash drive has a mechanism for that. Just ordinary writes are available to erase a USB flash key. You would use a USB flash key with encryption, if you want all data at rest to be encrypted (even data locked into a spared out block). Paul |
#3
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Dumb question
On 11/5/2015 9:19 PM, Good Guy wrote:
n't need to do anything other than simple format of your flash drive. People I have come across so far can't even undelete a deleted file and so they are not likely to unformat a drive. They won't know where to begin in the first place and I challenge you if any of the guys here are intelligent enough to recover anything from a formatted drive. Recently I have seen many Paranoid schizophrenic individuals here and wonder if these newsgroups are a magn OP Nothing sensitive on my thumbdrive, but I recently purchased a new main computer and was erasing the hard drive of the old computer prior to tossing it. It was a question of interest |
#4
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Dumb question
Keith Nuttle wrote:
I have recently had a Windows XP computer that I replaced with a Windows 8.1 computer. I scrubbed the disk with a disk eraser. Question: If I were to scrub a thumb drive or flash card, does it need the multipass cleaning that a hard drive would require? Thumb drive/flashcard stores in is chip memory, "and/or" gates. It seems like once the gate was change there would be no residual properties to remove. A hard drive stores by changing the surface properties of the disk. Planning on discarding the thumb drive/memory card ? - if so format it and destroy it. If not discarding the thumb/memory card, wipe it and re-use it. -- ....winston msft mvp consumer apps |
#5
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Dumb question
On Thu, 05 Nov 2015 11:31:23 -0500, Wolf K wrote:
A hard drive stores by changing the surface properties of the disk. Yes, you should wipe solid state memory as well. "Delete" does not in fact erase file data, it merely changes the information about the file so that the OS will no longer read the data. Just what's done and how it's done depends on the OS. I believe the probability of any normal user recovering overwritten data is close to zero. While one may fantasize about the challenge one's hd will be for the NSA to read, unless you're a terrorist they are unlikely to bother with your discarded hardware, they have better things to do. Having said this, it is important to protect data. In my case, being quite old, it's entirely possible my wife will be discarding my stuff and she doesn't know about these things. I use veracrypt and aescrypt to protect sensitive data. The rest anyone can have. |
#6
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Dumb question
Good Guy wrote on 11/5/2015 9:19 PM:
When you are in your 80s, you have health problems to worry about - not computing problems or privacy problems You can have all three to worry about!! |
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