External Drives

Gordon Mah Ung provides criteria for evaluating external drive technology , and recommends USB drives that are currently on the market.

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Securing USB Drives

Emmett Dulaney reviews several encyption options for securing USB drives .

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Increasing the Life of USB Drives

Stephen Lawson reports on efforts by SanDisk to increase the reliability and lifespan of flash memory used in USB drives and security devices such as cameras and sound monitors. The new drives are rated to work at temperatures as low as -40 C, compared with consumer devices that stop working below -25 C. The new drives will be able to accept as many as 128TB of information writes, far more than consumer grade drives.

The new capacity comes at the cost of slower writes and a current limit on total drive memory capacity of 64GB.

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USB Drives Compromised

Lucian Constantin reports that tools exist for creating malicious USB drives . Each USB drive has a chip that is a very small computer, and the USB drive can be programmed to send keystrokes to the computer or to execute other behavior.

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USB Drives As Threat Vectors

Dan Goodwin warns of the "Bad USB " threat. I predict that the ability to reprogram USB drives shall result in a massive market for hardened USB drives.

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Care of Flash Memory Devices

Kingston has a very good guide on "Caring for Your Flash Memory." One tip that is not mentioned, but that I discovered on my own: If your computer offers to correct possible file corruption on your drive, do a backup of your data before running any "repair" utility. I discovered that after I ran the Windows utility, the drive was unusable.

-DD