Self-Destruct Button Toasts Solid-State Hard Drive

The drive can overwrite its memory cells with junk data so it can't be read or send an electric pulse to flood the memory cells and burn them out

By Paul Wagenseil & SecurityNewsDaily

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It's a hard drive only a spy, or possibly a pyromaniac, could love.

The InVincible series of solid-state hard drives made by Chinese manufacturer RunCore have two dramatic optional security features, both activated by wires connected to the drives through the power connectors.

Press the green button, and the "Intelligent Destruction" feature activates, overwriting each memory cell with junk data and "uninitializing" the hard drive so it can't be read.

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Press the red button, and "Physical Destruction" begins. A strong electric pulse floods the memory cells, overloading the circuits and burning them out.

It appears that the drive needs to be connected to a power source for either feature to be activated.

A study last year showed that data was very difficult to erase from solid-state drives by normal means, creating an ongoing security risk.

[How to Survive a Hard Drive Crash or Laptop Theft]

In a YouTube video posted by RunCore, a young woman stands back before pressing the red button. Smoke puffs out of the drive, and a later examination reveals blackened, cracked memory chips.

"This is definitely the ultimate leakproof solution for your valuable data," says the woman.

YouTube commenters were pretty skeptical of the video.

"That smoke is as fake as Pam Anderson's boobs," wrote one.

"The photo of the damaged board is massively doctored with a lot of swirl effects," wrote another, "which is very easy to see when you know silk-screened lines [on the circuit board between the memory modules] are not supposed to be curved."

The website Legit Reviews said RunCore admitted that it had "tuned" the video to "make it become a notch more obvious."

Our Laptop Magazine colleagues tell us RunCore is a legitimate and respected maker of solid-state drives.

The RunCore website says the drives are aimed at defense users, and come in the two standard laptop-physical-enclosure sizes of 1.8 inches and 2.5 inches in diameter. Storage capacity starts at 16 gigabytes and, depending on the configuration, can go up to 512 gigabytes.

Pricing and release dates for the drives were not mentioned in the YouTube video or on the company website.

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