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  #1  
Old November 5th 15, 05:04 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-8
Keith Nuttle
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Posts: 1,844
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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  
Old November 5th 15, 08:52 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-8
Paul
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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  
Old November 6th 15, 03:45 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-8
Keith Nuttle
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Posts: 1,844
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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  
Old November 6th 15, 09:29 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-8
...winston‫
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Posts: 1,128
Default 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  
Old November 6th 15, 05:50 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-8
Dave C[_3_]
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Posts: 70
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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  
Old November 6th 15, 09:17 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-8
Cy Burnot
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Posts: 163
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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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