News Toshiba announces self-wipe drives

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/08/10/toshiba-announces-self-wipe-drives/1

 

Clip art makes everything ****. Even a potentially good idea.

 

Having used digital photocopiers before, I can safely say that they don't just get turned on at install and then turned off when you're ready to get rid of them.

Power cuts notwithstanding, our machines were all turned off at night - and there were quite a few commonly used documents we stored on the copier for ease of use, so does that mean that we'd have to load them onto the machine afresh every morning?

It's a case of one of those ideas that sounds brilliant in a lab, but not so great in the real world.

btw: should para 3 read "now-erased" rather than "new-erased"?

 

I love the Paint Made schematic.

"World's first"

"Actual size!"

 

well they could set up copy machines to access servers or a thumb-drive for docs you want to use often, overall for the financial markter and so forth that scans or copies personal data this is a good thing.

 

I can wipe!!!!

 

come to think of it wouldnt using simple ram allow for the same thing that when the system looses power the ram is wiped?

 

Epic prank?

 

This isn't a new concept. Set up a TrueCrypt container, with the key taken from /dev/urandom and stored in RAM.

Of course it may be the first purely hardware based solution. Do the drives handle the encyption/decryption, or is it still done by the CPU?

"Switching it off" and completely removing power (i.e. unplugging) are two different acts.

 

No, they're not when the copiers are on a timer switch. In this case, "switching off" really did mean removing power.

 

"Toshiba is aiming this latest range at manufacturers of printers and photocopiers that feature in-built storage devices in order to prevent cached documents from being leaked when leased systems are returned to their owners or older equipment gets sold off."

Or you could buy a system that has software that already wipes any document data as soon as the job is finished like the ones I work on at Xerox. Immediate Image Overwrite has been in our systems for years! Also wiping data when the machine is switched off wouldn't work for stored documents anyway as power cuts are regular enough to cause problems.

In terms of removing the power, we have many problems at customer sites with cleaners removing power chords in order to plug in their vacuum cleaners. No powering down, just pulling the plug while it's on and sometimes printing.

If you want your device to be cleared when it leaves, delete all stored jobs, then run an on demand image overwrite which blasts all data in the job storage areas of the HD, not as fast as using a fancy hd, but actually writes zeros over all the data rather than just deleting the key and leaving the data there to be hacked at a later date!