7 Mar
2011
7 Mar
'11
7:31 p.m.
No Idea who invented the hard drive (IBM maybe?) but Hitachi is selling out its division
to WD who will now be number one in the market beating out Seagate.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9213599/Western_Digital_to_buy_Hitac…
My stock of HDs has plenty of names that no longer exist (Fujitsu, Maxtor, Connor,
Micropolis, Quantum, and maybe a JPS drive). I am sure there are dozens of companies that
died before my collecting interest.
I wonder if WD will be the last company standing making spinning disks before SSD takes
over all markets.
7 Mar
7 Mar
7:42 p.m.
Expand it further...
Who made the last 14" HD's? The last 8" HD's, are they still making
5.25" HD's? When will the last 3.5" be sold....
So we can really expand this to see what the timeline has been, its like
the floppies.... doesn't anyone still make floppy disks brand new or
are we just buying up NOS ?
Curt
Teo Zenios wrote:
No Idea who invented the hard drive (IBM maybe?) but
Hitachi is selling out its division to WD who will now be number one in the market beating
out Seagate.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9213599/Western_Digital_to_buy_Hitac…
My stock of HDs has plenty of names that no longer exist (Fujitsu, Maxtor, Connor,
Micropolis, Quantum, and maybe a JPS drive). I am sure there are dozens of companies that
died before my collecting interest.
I wonder if WD will be the last company standing making spinning disks before SSD takes
over all markets.
7:47 p.m.
On 7 Mar 2011 at 22:31, Teo Zenios wrote:
I wonder if WD will be the last company standing
making spinning disks
before SSD takes over all markets.
We may be using flash both for external storage and internal storage.
There are some interesting developments that promise flash with the
speed of DRAM with a similar economy of scale.
Having spent a hunk of my professional life in computer forensics, I
found the following paper which posits that conventional data
recovery on SSDs isn't going to work very well:
http://www.jdfsl.org/subscriptions/JDFSL-V5N3-Bell.pdf
--Chuck
9:03 p.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 10:47 PM
Subject: Re: Who will be the last HD maker down the road?
On 7 Mar 2011 at 22:31, Teo Zenios wrote:
Interesting paper. So some kid 50 years from now can hack into the worlds
digital library and send a reformat command to the raid and after 3 minutes
of just sitting idle nothing will be recoverable.
I wonder if WD will be the last company standing
making spinning disks
before SSD takes over all markets.
We may be using flash both for external storage and internal storage.
There are some interesting developments that promise flash with the
speed of DRAM with a similar economy of scale.
Having spent a hunk of my professional life in computer forensics, I
found the following paper which posits that conventional data
recovery on SSDs isn't going to work very well:
http://www.jdfsl.org/subscriptions/JDFSL-V5N3-Bell.pdf
--Chuck
8 Mar
8 Mar
7:26 a.m.
On 3/7/11 9:03 PM, Teo Zenios wrote:
So some kid 50 years from now can hack into the worlds
digital library and send a reformat command to the raid and after 3 minutes of just
sitting idle nothing will be recoverable.
There would be something fundamentally broken in this library's architecture if anyone
would be capable of
wiping out every on-line and off-line backup of archived digital assets from a
'reformat' command.
7 Mar
7 Mar
9:49 p.m.
On 3/7/2011 10:47 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Having spent a hunk of my professional life in
computer forensics, I
found the following paper which posits that conventional data
recovery on SSDs isn't going to work very well:
http://www.jdfsl.org/subscriptions/JDFSL-V5N3-Bell.pdf
--Chuck
Chuck,
Have you followed this slashdot comment train?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/03/01/1740240/SSDs-Cause-Crisis-For-D…
I read Graeme's comment towards the top, but it didn't clear it up too
much for me.
The other paper here
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf
and summary info
http://news.techworld.com/storage/3262210/ssd-drives-difficult-to-wipe-secu…
is another paper which posits almost the opposite position?
Curious as to what your take on this, if you have a position.
Thanks
Keith
8 Mar
8 Mar
10:48 a.m.
On 8 Mar 2011 at 0:49, Keith Monahan wrote:
Have you followed this slashdot comment train?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/03/01/1740240/SSDs-Cause-Crisis-
For-Digital-Forensics
I read Graeme's comment towards the top, but it didn't clear it up too
much for me.
The other paper here
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf
and summary info
http://news.techworld.com/storage/3262210/ssd-drives-difficult-to-wipe
-securely-researchers-find/
is another paper which posits almost the opposite position?
Curious as to what your take on this, if you have a position.
The Wei paper sure looks nice, but most of what it says is obvious.
They really lost me when they discussed trying to degauss a SSD.
Graeme and Wei are essentially saying the same thing, with Wei
pointing out that some early SSDs don't do what they're supposed to
do.
In a sense, it doesn't matter. The sharp crooks use time-proven
methods to cover their tracks. By the time SSDs offer the same
economies of scale as mechanical hard drives, I imagine that
obliterating deleted data for those who wish to will not be a
problem.
--Chuck
10:15 a.m.
In article <4D75366B.21696.2604652 at cclist.sydex.com>,
"Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> writes:
We may be using flash both for external storage and
internal storage.
Flash memory is problematic for secure data. Basically, its nearly
impossible to securely erase a file from flash based disks.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>
5:54 p.m.
On 03/08/2011 10:15 AM, Richard wrote:
Flash memory is problematic for secure data.
Basically, its nearly
impossible to securely erase a file from flash based disks.
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
9 Mar
9 Mar
8:26 p.m.
Eric Smith wrote:
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.
If the secure erase feature is not available, then if it can be assumed
that there are no bad blocks with valid date and hidden away, about
how many time does it take to completely erase a hard disk drive block
for both ATA and non-ATA hard drive beyond all possibility of recovery?
In the past I have heard that a variable bit pattern written to a disk
block around seven times is sufficient to prevent the original data
from being recovered.
Jerome Fine
9:46 p.m.
Jerome H. Fine wrote:
If the secure erase feature is not available, then if
it can be assumed
that there are no bad blocks with valid date and hidden away, about
how many time does it take to completely erase a hard disk drive block
for both ATA and non-ATA hard drive beyond all possibility of recovery?
On drives with older recording technology (MFM or RLL), three passes of
random data should be enough, though the military standard used more
passes, some with fixed patterns and some random.
On modern drives using PRML (as they all do these days), one pass with
random data should be enough, but do several just to be certain.
I saw a paper about this a year or two ago, but can't find it at the moment.
Eric
7 Mar
7 Mar
10:54 p.m.
Teo Zenios wrote:
No Idea who invented the hard drive (IBM maybe?)
Yes, the IBM 350 disk system back in 1956, as part of the IBM 305 RAMAC
computer. The disk drive was about the size of a refrigerator, stored 5
million characters, and leased for over $3K/month.
but Hitachi is selling out its division to WD who will
now
be number one in the market beating out Seagate.
Note that Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) was originally
IBM's hard disk drive division.
I wonder if WD will be the last company standing
making spinning
disks before SSD takes over all markets.
There have been a LOT of predictions of the end of spinning disks over
the years. It will certainly happen eventually, but I'd wager that it's
still at least ten years away.
Eric
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