Who will be the last HD maker down the road?

On 03/08/2011 10:15 AM, Richard wrote: That used to be true, but is not any longer. These days most drives, both flash and rotating, implement "secure erase" commands which tell the drive's embedded controller to erase not just the logical blocks, but also any spared-out blocks that may contain residual user data. Of course, for classified data and any other data that needs to be secure from even extremely well-funded adversaries (i.e., intelligence agencies), physical destruction is still the only satisfactory erasure method. But telling the flash drive to do a secure erase should be good enough to keep even the commercial data recovery companies from being able to extract your credit card numbers, etc. Of course, there's no guarantee that the vendor implemented the secure erase correctly, just as there is no guarantee that they've implemented anything else correctly. You have to judge for yourself how valuable the information you're trying to erase is, and base your decision on that. Eric