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Re:Amazon Echo Dot does not wipe personal content after fact... by dylan604 on Saturday July 24, 2021 @11:23PM (#27946433)
>* If any part of a block is found to be corrupted for any reason, the block is transparently set aside and never used again, but its contents may still be present to read for someone that is willing to bypass the drive's firmware.

How useful is one block of recovered data?

Re:Amazon Echo Dot does not wipe personal content after fact... by KMnO4 on Saturday July 24, 2021 @11:33PM (#27946477)
Blocks can be up to 4mb. You could store all your passwords, private keys, contact/identity info, etc
Re:Amazon Echo Dot does not wipe personal content after fact... by dylan604 on Sunday July 25, 2021 @02:13AM (#27947131)
Really now. Last time I cared to look at any of this, it was all 4K blocks.
Re:Amazon Echo Dot does not wipe personal content after fact... by aaronmdjones on Sunday July 25, 2021 @02:36AM (#27947230)
You are confusing physical blocks (i.e. flash memory) with logical blocks (i.e. filesystems).

Edit: HDDs typically have 4K blocks though ("advanced-format drives"), but we're not talking about HDDs.

Re:Amazon Echo Dot does not wipe personal content after fact... by dylan604 on Sunday July 25, 2021 @02:50AM (#27947303)
Yeah, I honestly have not cared about how hard drives work in about 10 years since I built my last array. I have better things to do with my life than worry about this stuff. I just want to connect a drive, reformat/partition if necessary, and then go back to work. A single SSD now read/writes faster than a 16 drive array (got close in RAID0, but that's just dumb). Now, if SSDs could just get a decent volume size.
Re:Amazon Echo Dot does not wipe personal content after fact... by BenjiWiebe on Sunday July 25, 2021 @10:45AM (#27949517)
They've got what I consider decent size, it's just that the price can be a bit steep compared to an HDD, at least at quantities of 1. $700 will get you an 8TB SSD.
Re:Amazon Echo Dot does not wipe personal content after fact... by dylan604 on Sunday July 25, 2021 @11:00AM (#27949626)
8TB at blazing speeds to boot in a single device. To get decent speeds from HDD would require at least 8 drives striped together. So not only do you need 8+ HDD drives, you also need the enclosure. That would easily double the $700 for the single SSD. Luckily, with USBC/TB4, these enclosures come with the controllers built-in instead of requiring PCIe board