One for the techies. What do you think is the hardest hard drive to hack?

AMKC

I do not think anyone here will get it but sure might as well see.

So what hard drive is the hardest to hack?

L1011

Your question makes absolutely no sense.

Define "hard drive", because I think you don't mean what the term actual means

Define "hack", ditto.

sam t smith

One that is not connected to anything, encased in a 1 meter cubed block of ice.

AMKC

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929124#Comment_118929124

A hard drive as in something that records things be it data, pictures sound etc.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929149#Comment_118929149

and define "hack".

Also, new computers have generally not used hard drives for about five years or more now. Do you mean the general concept of mass storage, or specifically spinning pieces of glass with iron oxide on them?

AMKC

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929155#Comment_118929155

Hack to get information from them.

Yes I mean the general concept of mass storage.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929195#Comment_118929195

Every hard drive is identically non-complicated to get information from. Insert in to something with the correct interface and go.

Your question still makes no sense. What are you trying to do? Encrypt data? That is not dependent on the physical media.

AMKC

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929198#Comment_118929198

Not every hard drive. There are billions of hard drives that will not give information away unless they want to.

SimonTemplar

A hard drive in a device that is not capable of connecting to the internet or any other network cannot be 'hacked' by someone not physically with the device. But that obviously won't prevent someone stealing the data directly from the device. To mitigate against that, you'd need strong encryption software regardless of the type or brand of HD. I'm not an expert but I think most encryption can be broken eventually, it's just a matter of how long it takes.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929214#Comment_118929214

Eh. No.

Please explain wtf you were actually asking. Because I'm not sure you even know.

SimonTemplar

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929214#Comment_118929214

That statement is fundamentally incorrect. It might be best to describe in detail the 'hacking' scenario you wish to prevent.

AMKC

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929220#Comment_118929220

Eh ye.

Jeez I knew I should have waited till the morning to start this thread.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929252#Comment_118929252

Wait til you know what on earth you actually want to ask.

Unless the contents of a hard drive are encrypted - done by the OS or specific additional software, not the drive - it is readable in its entirety to anyone who has the drive and knows what they're done.

With some effort to find them , I have kit with connectors for most types of SCSI drives, IDE (40 and 44 pin), SATA, mSATA and m2 solid state drives. That's basically the entire gamut from about 1993 to now. The drive itself is never going to protect your data.

AMKC

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929264#Comment_118929264

Awe OK. Very good. Yes you are right maybe I should have worded it better. There is billions of organic hard drives who are mot readable to everyone. That is what I was trying to get at. That our memory is a hard drive too.

You seem to know a lot about hard drives. Would you know who invented the first hard drive,

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929277#Comment_118929277

Whatever analogy you were trying to make fails horribly on the basis that there is no such thing as hacking a hard drive.

A probably unnamed IBM engineer or engineering team developed the first hard drive; IBM dominated the tech for hard drives for quite some time.

AMKC

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929281#Comment_118929281

Your not far off,

IBM engineer Reynold B. Johnson

IBM engineer Reynold B. Johnson is the individual who came up with the idea, of the external hard drive. Johnson's first external hard drive, the IBM 350 Disk File, supported the IBM 305 RAMAC computer system. This hard drive system was introduced on September 13, 1956.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929264#Comment_118929264

With some effort to find them, LOL :)

I've an 8 bit controller somewhere, but I can't remember if it's MFM or RLL , must remember not to throw out the last machine with ISA slots.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929277#Comment_118929277

Organic hard drives are not reliable. You can't be sure about storage rot.

Hard drives, and satellite TV use Forward Error Correction and checksums. So there's extra redundant data stored that you can use to recreate small amounts of missing data when the checksums don't add up. Humans have false memories and stuff like deja vu.

Doylers

Buy an IronKey and call it a night lol Your question is very confusing so if you want somewhere to hide a few files and you'll remove when not in use then job done.

https://www.kingston.com/en/usb-flash-drives?use=data%20security

AllForIt

I'm glad I never worked in IT support

SimonTemplar

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929430#Comment_118929430

I did for a while and I'll never forget the time I told a user (who was a senior manager) to "type your password" and he literally typed the phrase "your password".

sam t smith

@AMKC have you watched the film Johnny Mnemonic?

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118930134#Comment_118930134

Twice doubled to 320GB of volatile storage.

That bit of the film is totally plausible because today's SSD's use a similar trick. (And next time you watch the film Sneakers just think quantum computer)

Why store a single bit in a capacitor when you can store 3 or 4 ? Instead of having 3 voltage levels per cell ( high , low, and in between where you pray Forward Error Correction works) you now have 31 different voltage levels per cell 15 of which mean you've lost the data so more susceptible to data loss as the capacitors discharge.

[RANT]

And the only downsides are it's way slower, write cycles and powered off storage times per cell drop by a factor of ten with each extra bit. An SLC will have a thousand times as many write cycles as a TLC with threes bit per cell.

It means they sell a 960 TB drive with the same memory cells as a 240GB , because who wants fast reliable storage ?

And it isn't cheaper, you take the risk, they take the profit. :mad:

[/RANT]

dxhound2005

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058241797/one-for-the-techies-what-do-you-think-is-the-hardest-hard-drive-to-hack

That's easy. The Western Digital AV-GP 3.5 inch 500GB Intellipower RPM Internal Hard Drive.

Harddrives are an open book. Data is safe by encoding what's written there. I've no idea what is most common these days but you can set up sort of drives within drives that would take a billion years to get into.

There's a great YouTube channel called Computerphile that does a lot of videos on cryptography. The particular professor who does those videos is really good.

Capt'n Midnight

https://hackaday.com/2022/04/14/weve-heard-of-bricking-a-hard-drive-but/

Guaranteed impossible to hack drives.