OT: SSD and EMP

[Joseph Sinclair]

This is correct.
EMP will kill SSD easier than even the chips or magnetic media. This is primarily because EMP will induce a capacitive load in the floating gate of the NAND cell; this will turn every bit in the chip to a '1'.  SSD floating gate charge is extremely small, so it doesn't take much of an EMP to wipe the devices.
Place any *unshielded* SSD within 3 meters of a 1000KV power line for a couple seconds and you'll see the same effect.
That said, many actual internal SSD drives (as opposed to flash media, USB drives, or mSATA drives) are available with conductive and grounded cases; those would probably not loose data as they're, effectively, inside a Faraday Cage structure already (as long as the ground connection is sufficiently conductive).

On 12/01/2011 12:25 PM, Michael Butash wrote:
> Not magnetic per se, but I think an emp would kill it for the same reason static discharge will fry an IC, of which it has plenty.  I'll bet the nand flash doesn't get along with EM very well either.
> 
> -mb
> 
> 
> On 12/01/2011 11:56 AM, der.hans wrote:
>> moin moin,
>>
>> discussing things at work and EMPs came up. It was almost on topic :).
>>
>> Anyway, an EMP would knock out data on hard drives, would it not?
>>
>> A co-worker says SSD is not magnetic, so would not be affected by an EMP.
>> Is that correct?
>>
>> ciao,
>>
>> der.hans
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