Erasing USB key Drives

In other words, to truly "erase" any given file on a USB key drive, the program doing the erasing would have to interact directly with the low-level routine of the USB key drive so that the memory cells that contain the copy you want to erase can be written to directly.
 
Well, I got a new program for my computer and I want to put it on my flash drive because it takes up a lot of space. but the one I got has been used before by someone else (got it from Mom's work) and it has NO free space. So I have 2 questions. How do I completely wipe it clean? And how do I put the program on it? Its a U3 or something. And btw Please don't use fancy computer talk, I don't know what the heck you'd be talking about, thanks.
 
CarlosamPlus said:
Well, I got a new program for my computer and I want to put it on my flash drive because it takes up a lot of space. but the one I got has been used before by someone else (got it from Mom's work) and it has NO free space. So I have 2 questions. How do I completely wipe it clean? And how do I put the program on it? Its a U3 or something. And btw Please don't use fancy computer talk, I don't know what the heck you'd be talking about, thanks.
Click to expand...

That's actually possible. But if you put a program on a USB drive, there would be a huge chance that it would be slow when used since it will get the files onto the drive and the speed won't be that good when compared to being stored on an HDD.
 
The update is:
- Individual file erase is NOT safe on any type of SSD drive.
- Wiping the freespace is not 100% either as there may be over provisioning on the drive or damaged memory locations.

Current solution:
- You need to encrypt the drive with truecrypt.
- Within the encrypted container you must do a freespace erase after erasing an individual file.
 
To the best of my knowledge, USB drives have not changed in the way they work, since the post in 2007.

SSDs however, work differently, and they specifically have systems to defeat the way Eraser works (as their design, I'm sure not by deliberate intent)
 
Most Windows users have become conditioned over time to never unplug a USB flash drive or hard drive without first clicking Safely Remove Hardware in the System Tray.

Why is that necessary? In theory, it's to ensure that Windows isn't busy reading from or writing to the drive when you remove it, something that could result in corrupted data or even a damaged drive.

As it turns out, however, you can safely sidestep Safely Remove Hardware with little to no loss of performance. In fact, this option may already be enabled on your system, and you just didn't know it. Yep, you may have been wasting extra clicks all this time.

Do this:

1. Plug your USB drive into your PC, then open Device Manager. (Note: These steps are based on Windows 7. Things might look different in previous versions of Windows.)

2. Expand Disk Drives, then find the entry for your removable drive. On my system, for example, it's called "USB2.0 Flash Disk USB Device."

3. Right-click that entry, then click Properties.

4. Click the Policies tab; you should see something like this:
usb20drive20quick20removal-11354575.jpg


5. If the first option, Quick removal, is already selected, you're good to go. As noted in its description, "you can disconnect the device safely without using the Safely Remove Hardware notification icon." If Better performance is selected, switch to Quick removal and click OK.

So, what are giving up by disabling write caching? According to the test results posted at 7tutorials, almost nothing. The performance impact was negligible. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think it's worth a few milliseconds to avoid the hassles of having to mess with Safely Remove Hardware all the time.
 
I am using one of those Trek secure drives which have a hidden or secure area which becomes available by logging in with a password.
when trying to do a unused space overwrite in the secure part, Eraser stops after writing in 2gb data.
What could be the reason ? (using the latest Eraser)
 
Have not tried that product but 2G seems like a FAT limitation. Is the secure partition formatted as FAT16/FAT32 or NTFS?
 
garrett01 said:
Have not tried that product but 2G seems like a FAT limitation. Is the secure partition formatted as FAT16/FAT32 or NTFS?
Click to expand...
the outer partition shows up as FAT and the inner secure partition as FAT32.
you might be right, it could be a FAT limitation.
 
If you have any suggestion about it, let me know. Meanwhile it seems that once you have sensitive data on USB, you can never sell it - must destroy it unless you create a 256 bit encryption using truecrypt right from the start. One thing I don't get is how can USB drives retain the old data even when you fill the entire memory with new data. I'd think that the old data would have to be erased to make space for the new data.
 
Here for USB key drive, it has much useful ways. Some software need it to burn, then you can use it on any computer. Maybe this is the easiest use for it.
 
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To the more about USB funtion, that I know about Windows 7 password recovery USB. Using a easy usb to create a disk to help you do that in quickest way. Windows Password Key is the easy tool that can help usr reset Windows login password easily.

See more at: www. lostwindowspassword. com
 
So are you saying that Eraser works only partially on USB drives? I think that was already pretty much discussed in this thread - that Eraser can't completely erase USB drives because the data is stored over the entire empty space.
While I am unable to open the files myself, I think that a professional could be able to open those files. What I want to know is whether these files would still be recovered if I had used a regular hard drive.
 
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