Is it safe to zero out a thumb drive?

I'd just like to know if it's safe to zero out a thumb drive? I thought I had read before that zeroing out can damage flash cells. Is this true?

 

Yes, it's called secure erase like for SSD's. It'll just wear out the drive a bit faster than normal that's all in return for all data erased (non-recoverable) and speeds brought back to default.

Use this: http://hddguru.com/software/2006.04.13-HDD-Wipe-Tool/

 

Thanks for the helpful answer. I use the linux 'dd' command though to zero out drives.

 

Yes, you can zero out a flash drive.

But it isn't really necessary. Trying to recover / undelete data off of flash memory is pretty much impossible. Yes, the memory cells may still contain the 1's and 0's of your data. But without some kind of file table to actually map out those bits of data into readable files, that data might as well be useless.

 

True low level formatting is quite pointless nowadays since the HDD's firmware won't allow it anyway. All that's left of it is erasing the MBR which is neither "magic" (as some tools might want to tell you) nor secure.
One could compare it to ripping out the the table of content from a book. It will be harder to find a specific chapter or file, but it does not add any security against someone who is willing to read the whole book/medium to find what he's looking for.

Good start, but don't do that every day on a whole flash drive. To erase the MBR just run this:

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1 # replace X with the flash drive's device name

Undeleting data from a storage medium is not that hard if the data itself hasn't been deleted somehow. Especially on non-journaling file systems like fat or ext2 it works pretty well, even if the MBR was erased. It does not matter if the medium is a hard disk or a flash medium as long as the file system is intact.

Actually the only way to reliably delete a flash medium without wearing it too much or even destroying it completely is to flash the controller's memory of the flash cell contents. That's what the TRIM command "secure erase" does. For any flash medium without TRIM support the only alternative with similar effect would be to reflash the controller.
For secure single-file deletion on HDDs there is the "wipe" tool which should be available in every mayor Linux distribution.

 

Very easy to recover data from flash drives! Even if they have been formatted.

While I wouldn't recommend zeroing flash drives on a regular basis (because the nand they contain is sub-par (write/erase longetivity-wise) compared to what SSD's offer...) if you are giving/selling this away, it is highly recommended to overwrite every available cell you can to protect any sensitive data it contained (ever).

Good luck.

 

Like with hdd's, I simply use

Code:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/XXX bs=256k

It's always worked for me.