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Smoke-belching flash drive self-destructs on command

Do not press the red button!

Vid Chinese flash biz Runcore has built a self-destructing solid-state drive.

The ironically named InVincible SATA SSD is aimed at military applications and customised SSD markets where a very high degree of data protection is required. It comes in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch rugged form factors with SATA, PATA and CF Card interfaces, and holds up to 512GB of data.

As you can witness in the video below, the InVincible protects stored content from falling into the wrong hands at the press of a couple of buttons. Hit the green one to overwrite every NAND cell with random junk data, leaving the SSD to be initialised and reused from scratch. It's Green - see?

Now, maybe writing random data over your files isn't enough. You need to burn your documents. This is where the red button comes into play. Press that and the NAND cells are physically destroyed, complete with inexplicable magic blue smoke.

Presumably you don't actually need to hit the push switches - the connectors can be wired up to some output line for remote, or even local, electronic control. And red is a bad choice; who could resist hitting a shiny big red button?

El Reg's storage desk can imagine a scenario in which the device is embedded in some military equipment that is about to fall into enemy hands. Then you could send it a signal to self-destruct. But fiddling about with button-ended wires? That's a Runcore gimmick, surely, designed to catch the attention of shallow-minded hacks, er, us. ®

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