data safe way to sell RAM

for HDDs people do multipass format before they sell it.

what about for ram?

 

nothing. once powered off the data is gone anyways.

 

RAM is volatile memory meaning the data it holds cannot be there once powered off, that is the difference between Sleep, and Hibernate, cause sleep requires a small amount of electricity to keep the RAM from losing it's data.

 

Super face palm and one more thing... does hibernate store the data on the hard drive or what?

 

yes. that's the reason to have a C:\hiberfil.sys on your system.

 

I know what nonvolatile memory is. I was referring to any process I should do to make sure the RAM last stores useless crap in there. Who knows who will buy my second hand RAM and what info they can get from it if any from my last boot using the ram.

 

There is nothing stored in RAM if it doesn't have power going through it. Even if you put the laptop to sleep to store the state of Windows in memory, the instant you pull those RAM modules out of the slots, there will be no data on them.

 

Thats like saying delete files from your harddrive removes the data. No it can still be read. Thats like saying doing a single overwrite pass delete removes data. No, experts can still read it.

I was kinda, and still am, lookin for some paranoid but smart guru who can shed some light on this.

 

I highly suggest selling memory modules to your friends and family my friend!

 

Once power is cut from a volatile memory source, the memory is GONE.

The whole point of volatile memory.

 

Hello friend. Nothing is impossible. I highly suggest reading this my friend.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-536.html

 

RAM doesn't store data the same way as a hard drive. Once power is cut from RAM there is no possibility of recovering any of the information it once contained. Trying to recover data from RAM would be like going to a beach and trying to reconstruct sandcastles that have been built by previous visitors. You can't.

 

The retention time is within seconds at room temperature.

 

Look, whoever posted the thing about freezing RAM to read it, that actually does not help the point. That is saying if the data is still imprinted on the RAM (aka its still plugged in), then it can be frozen. Not that once its removed it can magically be frozen like a popsicle and spit out your info.

Im sorry to say this, but seconds after you unplug a stick of RAM, all data is totally safe, cannot be retrieved, and hold no valuable information. Unless of course you live on the dark, cold side of the moon.

Or to be ultra safe, you can snap the stick in half and send it to them. That way unless they are a super-spy, they cannot repair the stick and retrieve any info.

 

No offense mate. I'll kindly suggest to the OP that you keep your RAM if you're that paranoid, especially after everyone here is telling you that the RAM modules are volatile memory. Good luck.

 

That's the wikipedia entry on SRAM.
And that is what was used in the laboratory experiments the paper refers to.

Imho your memory will be SDRAM.

 

If I remember correctly SRAM is your L2 Cache.

 

Thread closed, you've done enough to sufficiently embarrass the OP that I doubt he'll want to come back to NBR and ask the lot of you for help in the future.

Yes, there are ways to extract data from RAM after a computer is turned off...but these methods have to be started within a few seconds of your computer being turned off. Regardless of what type of volatile memory your system uses the attack window is a few seconds at best.