Why Multi-Pass DoD Erase Schemes Don’t Translate to Flash Memory, Despite Being Widely Referenced For a long time, secure erase meant one thing: overwrite the data. Then overwrite it again. And maybe again, just to be safe. That approach worked, it was measurable, and it aligned neatly with Department of Defense guidance written in the […]
In a world where everything can be edited, one courier carries the last device that refuses to change.
When One USB Drive Shows Up as Two: What’s Really Going On At some point you’ve probably plugged in a USB flash drive and thought, “Why are there two drives showing up?” Or maybe Windows refused to delete a mysterious read-only volume. Or Disk Management showed something you couldn’t remove no matter how many times […]
Understanding the Difference Between File Verification and Device Verification If you’ve worked with USB duplication long enough, you’ve probably heard conflicting advice about MD5, SHA, disk signatures, and “bit-for-bit” verification. Some of it sounds overly academic. Some of it sounds like marketing. And some of it is simply wrong. The problem usually isn’t that the […]
The performance drop most people blame on “bad cards” is usually normal behavior. If you’ve ever had a microSD card that felt fast when it was new but frustratingly slow a year later, you’re not imagining things. This is a real, measurable behavior in flash storage, and it happens even with reputable brands. The important […]
At first glance, this USB port looks normal. But a closer look reveals compacted dust, fibers, and residue sitting directly on the contact surface. This kind of contamination doesn’t usually cause immediate failure. Instead, it creates unstable electrical contact that leads to intermittent disconnects, unreliable charging, slower transfer speeds, and unexplained device behavior. Ports don’t […]
Five Reasons USB Sticks Will Be Around a Dozen More Years — and Why Flash Drives Still Matter in a Cloud-First World Reason #1. Universal Compatibility Isn’t Going Anywhere If you’ve been around USB as long as we have at GetUSB.info—since 2004, back when flip phones ruled the earth and “cloud” meant weather—you start to […]
The Untold Life of a microSD Card: From Silicon Wafer to Secure Erasure From the outside, a microSD card looks boring. It is a black rectangle with a logo on top and some gold contacts on the back. You plug it in, it stores data, and as long as your photos or firmware or logs […]
A security dongle is a small USB key that protects licensed software by proving ownership through hardware, not just a password. A security dongle, sometimes called a license dongle or hardware key, is a small device—usually USB—that unlocks or enables specific software when connected to a computer. It’s a physical token of trust. Inside the […]
USB “Local Disk” in 2025: the XP-era hack had its moment—here’s the cleaner way (plus a product we found) If you landed here from our old tutorial about making a USB stick look like a hard drive, you’re reading a time capsule. That guide leaned on an XP-friendly INF/registry trick (tweaking the removable bit with […]
There’s buzz in the dev and IT circles about a new type of USB drive being tested by a Southern California tech group — and it’s not your average thumb drive. Unlike traditional models, this device identifies as a Local Disk instead of a removable drive. That subtle shift could have a big impact for […]
“Encryption” is a term which is used too broadly to describe security. A good example, is the term “encrypted USB flash drives.” This phrase means different things to different people. Some interpret an encrypted flash drive to be a flash drive which requires a password to be entered before the files can be viewed. Some […]
