Encryption is the art of preserving confidentiality of digital information. It is considered to be one of the most ideal solutions for providing data confidentiality and safety of computer hard disk. Many disk encryption software are commercially available with a variety of features. But how much effective security is provided by those software is the ultimate question. Encryption algorithms us...

One of the common anecdotal complaints used when defending the insecure erasure of hard disks is the length of time taken to affect a secure erasure. This paper discusses results of experiments conducted with Unix/Linux based hard disk wiping software when run on various machines and hard disk mechanisms in terms of size, speed and interface. The initial research has uncovered a range of issues...

Wear particles in a hard disk drive may cause the head/disk interface to fail. We have experimentally investigated wear particle generation resulting from fretting wear between the dimple on the suspension and the gimbal spring. We have found that increasing the normal load as well as using a low friction coating reduces the formation of wear particles. INTRODUCTION Examination of failed hard d...

Suffix trees are incredibly useful structures for computational genomics and combinatorial pattern matching. Due to the small alphabet sizes used in computational genomics, specialised hard-disk based suffix trees have been designed, but the problem of creating an efficient hard-disk based suffix tree for large and unbounded alphabet sizes remains essentially unsolved. We have designed a hard-d...