How To Erase A Flash Drive
I would like to know if there is a way to securely erase USB flash drives without a chance to recover data from it once it has been erased. I know, that programms like DBAN can be used to securely erase HDDs, but as they work different from flash based drives, I am not sure if I can use DBAN to securely erase my USB drives.If DBAN cannot be used, how do I erase USB flash drives?I know that SSDs have to be erased using programs that reset the data cells and are often available from the manufacturer, but I do not know if this is also the case for USB flash drives. UPDATE: Upon looking back it looks like using random data is not really necessary as a successful platter-level 'previous state' attack on a zeroed drive has yet to be proven possible in a real-world attack.I've left the references below for posterity and because it does technically work fine if you're using random data, but given that just using 0s is much faster, that's probably the more reasonable option.Flash storage, particularly SSDs, require a block/cell be wiped before more data can be written. As a result, writing would be slow if additional technology wasn't implemented.Instead, your drive actually has 10-20% more storage than the listed capacity and an onboard memory controller will dynamically map empty cells and, during low load, wipe unmapped ones. This creates the security issue that you've encountered.Without a tool that can leverage the memory controller your OS has no way of addressing every single cell at any given time. Many manufacturers are now providing tools that will allow you to manage the drive and securely wipe it but should your drive not have such a tool there are few perfect workarounds.Aside from reverse-engineering a tool to manage the memory controller the best method I know of is to do many successive writes.dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/devicenameFilling the drive with random data and then doing so again and again will cause the drive to constantly remap the cells and eventually you'll overwrite enough of them to be reasonably secure. The more successive overwrites the higher the chances that you will have written to every cell.NOTE: Technically, these successive overwrites should also be done with a traditional HDD, but for a totally different reason.
How To Erase A Flash Drive For Reuse 2019
High accuracy equipment may be able to read previous magnetic states directly from the platter to recover data. This is why it's important not to overwrite with 0s or 1s, as it'll leave a easy to determine the previous state of the bits.For an easier fix, throw the drive through a physical shredder. Obviously not a solution if you plan on reselling or reusing the drive but generally one of the most secure methods. Encrypt a large picture of noise such that the file size occupies most of the drive. Do the same for a medium sized picture and then a small picture.
Copy the large picture to the drive and if you have any room left over copy the smaller pictures to it. Avoid copying the same file to the drive more than once.Repeat the process with new pictures of noise.Repeat again.You are now pretty darn safe.
Method 1: Wipe USB Flash Drive by Using Inbuilt Format Option All computers using Windows system comes with an inbuilt format option to erase everything from a USB flash drive. However, many of us format disks by way of quick format which completes within seconds, but cannot clean data for good. Either way, you’d then use Disk Utility to erase the drive, then repeat the encryption step. Finally, erase it in Disk Utility again to leave it free for the next user.
Drives are erased through formatting and can be used immediately. Insert the thumb drive into a free USB port on your computer. Try to avoid USB hubs and plug the drive into a port on the back of the PC. Press 'Windows-X' to open the Windows Tools menu and choose 'File Explorer' from the menu to launch the File Explorer.
How to remove investments in microsoft money. At this point, I would expect ONLY the NSA would be able to decrypt the portion of the drive that was repeatedly written to.If the issue is a magnetic hard drive then the answer is a bit different.For a magnetic hard drive, use a program that is designed to perform a high-level shredding operation - I think it involves 11(?) wipes.If you want to get ridiculous, repeat the process two more times, once at an elevated temperature (say 90F ambient) and then again with the computer at a very low temperature (e.g., 50F). That will help shift the read-write head relative to the platen by a few billionths of an inch so that the edge boundaries are scrubbed a smidgen more than they would have been otherwise.This would be pretty effective as long as the scrubber ignores the parts of the HD that were labeled as 'BAD' and scrubs the BAD along with the good sectors.Cool?