Yes, your cell phone, smart phone and USB drives are all solid state data storage devices. There is a very real problem with sanitizing these devices. The manufactures offer tools to delete data from their products but studies have shown that the tools are less than 50% effective. The problem resides in the firmware utilized by the manufactures to tell the devices where to store data. If you don’t use the data sanitization tool that exactly matches the firmware of your device it’s not going to work. Manufactures are constantly tinkering with their firmware to improve the devices performance so there maybe 10 or more firmware revisions on a single device model. Even the manufacturers don’t know what firmware is on your device. As solid state data storage devices proliferate the data sanitization challenge becomes almost impossible to manage within organizations with large fleets of devices. Many of our customers have simply reached the conclusion that the likelihood of sanitization failure for solid state devices is not worth the risk. They have us shred all their obsolete cell phones and smart phones.
As solid state devices add storage capacity, the electronics used to store the data become smaller. Shredding may destroy the storage device itself but not the storage electronics. We have begun using disintegrators to destroy USB storage devices and high capacity solid state drives.
For more information on this challenge visit the website of the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory at the University of California San Diego nvsl.ucsd.edu/sanitize
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