hard drive

[loosecannon39]

curious about the security of droid system. i have Ee on my pc, but wonder how secure are items erased from storage device like the droid uses??? Specifically, is it easier , harder, or no difference for computer forensic pros to retrieve info that was deleted from each????
TKS
DAN

 

[Backnblack]

I would say No Difference...

 

[jimnutt]

Typically flash memory systems never truly delete anything until they have to. Flash has a limited number of write cycles (it's very high, but it is limited), so what happens is that the OS always tries to write to a spot on the flash that's been written to the least. Deleting something just unlinks it from the file system, but the data is still there on the flash driver. I'm sure there are utilities out there that can scrub a flash drive (write zeros to every location), but I don't know what they would be. I'm thinking it would be pretty much impossible to recover data after that's been done.

 

[MonkeyTime]

I'm not sure about flash memory, but hard drives can be read after they've been written over multiple times. It's very expensive, but can be done.

 

[jimnutt]

Very different technologies. The magnetic field used to write to a hard drive leaves a residue that can be read even after it's been overwritten a few times. Flash memory doesn't really have a residue. There's a good article at how stuff works.