At the same time, SSDs only represent about one third of the current PC hard drive market, so conventional spinning drives are still mostly the primary concern. Many of them have onboard encryption, which means the drive’s circuit board is necessary to decode anything stored on the memory chip. Modern solid-state drives (SSDs) and flash memory can be more susceptible to drowning, Chozick says. As long as the platters are not allowed to dry out, which he says could leave hard-to-clean residue behind, forensics experts should be able to recover data with relative ease.

“The data's still on the platters, regardless if they got wet or not,” explains Russell Chozick, vice president of Flashback Data, a data-recovery firm in Austin, Texas. Water might short out the electronics, but that’s about it. An actuator and other electronic components control the entire operation. The platter is centered on a spindle, which controls its rotation a head uses an electric current to read and write data. Data is stored in blocks of 1s and 0s on an aluminum, ceramic or glass platter, which looks a lot like a CD. But if one was, data-forensics experts say there is a good chance stored information will still be easily accessible, and that there would have been more effective ways to destroy the drive.Ī hard drive works almost exactly like a record player.

Reports indicated that shooters Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook had ditched their laptop hard drive, which may contain e-mails and other evidence, in the murky water around the time of the attack.Īlthough the search has concluded, investigators have not confirmed whether or not a drive was recovered.

This time last week FBI divers were searching Seccombe Lake, a freshwater lake about three kilometers from the Inland Regional Center, the site of December 2 shooting that left 14 dead and 22 injured.

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