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This may be my paranoia talking, but is there a way short of an examination with a scanning electron microscope to ensure that the erase command is actually doi
by Karunamon 11y ago
This may be my paranoia talking, but is there a way short of an examination with a scanning electron microscope to ensure that the erase command is actually doing what it's supposed to do?
Not so much that the drive manufacturers are engaging in malfeasance (though that's certainly not off the table), but that it's not unheard of for certain agencies in certain governments to crock low level system components (intercepting them in shipping and so forth) so they work against the user.
..or just plain ignorance. A study indicates that back in 2011, half of the major drive vendors weren't doing the erase correctly. https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast11/tech/full_papers...
- andrewstuart2 11y agoYou could just read the disk again and check for nonzero blocks. If you don't trust the disk to read or write to itself either, then you might as well just toss it.
- Karunamon 11y agoIt wouldn't be that technically complex to have modified firmware that looks for the secure erase command (not something that's ever invoked except purposefully by the user), and returns all random for read sectors without ever actually overwriting the underlying data. But yeah, you're right. If you ever have reason to invoke the secure erase command, you're probably in a position where the next step is throwing the drive in a shredder.