Would that mean that, hypothetically, a bad actor could convince the manufacturer to place sensitive data about you in inaccessible parts of the disk? So short of destroying it completely, a computer (especially one where permanent storage is soldered in) could be assumed to contain anything that was stored on it even once?

Well when the government will become very interested in hoarding old electronics and registering every facility able to destroy them, we should become suspicious.

I would be very relieved to be proven paranoid.

You don't even need a bad actor, the drive will do that on its own. Malicious firmware only needs to be invoked if the attacker wants to be SURE that the preserved data 'just happened' to cover e.g. your crypto keys.

Do you mean a type of spinning disk that also has flash memory for caching? I thought spinning disks normally used volatile memory for the cache?

No, platter drives usually don't have nonvolatile cache although it's hard to say for sure. Enterprise drives are more likely to. The bigger issue with spinning drives is that they move data around the platters in ways not disclosed by the manufacturers, including both optimizations (writing near heads) and error corrections like ending use of problematic parts of the platter. These all leave bits of data in "non-addressable" parts of the platter.

Ah, that's interesting. I wonder how hard it'd be to find these areas of the disk, I wonder if the location of them is stored in some kind of non volatile memory, so the disk can easily find them.

And the Dave Kleiman who is second author on this paper is that Dave Kleiman, the one who most likely invented bitcoin.

Wright has claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto but has proven himself to be a liar on this topic; by his actions he clearly believes that Kleiman controlled the Satoshi bitcoin fortune before his untimely death.

Dave Kleiman had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of Bitcoin.

Prior to his death Kleiman was IT support staff for a small county sheriff's department in Florida. He has no relevant expertise -- e.g. the only evidence of Kleiman ever writing any program ever was a simple visual basic script to automate checking the windows registry for forensic information. Literally the only thing remotely suggesting any connection is documents from Wright which are provably forged and created after Dave's death.

[Wright's forgeries tend to be extremely bad: Stuff like changing the year in emails but not fixing the day of the week and misspelling Dave's name -- in emails supposedly from Dave. Accidentally producing unmodified originals, citing laws that didn't exist until years later, using software versions that didn't exist until years later, referencing URLs on his own domain names that he didn't register until years later, accidentally producing "dave"'s private keys in discovery ... but they're also extremely numerous, so it's easy to get smothered under the total mass of them.]

Wright invoked his former friend in his scheme posthumously to solve a specific logistical problem: Wright himself can't program (certainly not in C/C++). So in his forgeries he included someone who couldn't contradict his stories so that Wright could beg off his inability to answer questions as "Dave did that part". Fortunately for Wright, it turned out that none of the eligible victims asked any hard questions. Unfortunately for Wright, Dave's family came after him for their share of the fortune Wright claimed they created together. Fortunately for Wright, Dave didn't actually help him (because neither had early involvement in Bitcoin). Unfortunately for Wright, all the easily proved forgeries in the case with the estate end up making it look like Wright is covering up the involvement to hide what he owes. Wright's frogurt is cursed, but also doesn't exist. (So that's good?)

Kleiman isn't the only deceased person that Wright involuntarily enlisted into his con-- Wright as also claimed that he was aided by Gareth Williams (some MI6 spy that was in the news at the time Wright started spinning this yarn) and David Rees -- an older academic who was disabled and unresponsive in a care home at the time Wright claimed to have been working with him.

The Satoshi Nakamoto emails were compromised in 2013 & available on the dark web & that was when the Faketoshi saga took form. Too bad these are the elements we all have to deal with years later.

Bitcoin was formed in C then translated to C++. Too bad for Crack that he has only began to realize that Satoshi Nakamoto is a group with wide reach and several people.