perhaps a silly question, but could this be used to remove personal data from devices that are to be discarded?
I cannot get video working on my computer...
It might effect devices with Solid State Drives. . . but not anything with a hard drive. This works by frying the motherboard or logic board. It may not even reach the data on a Solid State Drive. . . so I wouldn't put any faith in data destruction by its use.
Not in most circumstances. This only fries the circuitry, not the data storage.
No, silly. It will just wreck the first DC-blocking capacitors on your motherboard and other USB devices in concurrent attachment o the same circuit, not the hard drives or removeable media that are storing yur data. Just remove them and reinstall them in another computer, and most ofthe data will be available, AFIK.
A 9mm is the only safe way to insure the data is not recoverable.
The theory of operation is that USB traffic, by spec deals with POSTED commands. Essentially, this means that upstream there is a “Did younget this?” request that MUST be answered. It cannot be ignored.
By blowing out the data transmit/receive buffers, the bus and thereby the PC is permanently hung. Everything stops. With the transmit/buffers blown nothing gets communicated about a timeout or bad device.
That said, there is nothing that would lead one to assume that any data on a SSD would be affected as the Solid state drive is on a SATA bus, which is on a totally different bus hub structure than the USB bus. Further, PCI buses can be like a tree and have 3+ branches. Any of these branches could support multiple USB hubs, so depending which USB hub was blown, could mean limited loss of functionality or total.
That said, the opto-isolators are the best protection you will find for this type of attack.