Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

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Tag Archives: HDD

No excuses – Encrypt Now, Yesterday and Tomorrow

Us mobile people like all the newest gear, particularly when it either speeds things up, saves precious battery life or makes our equipment more robust. SSDs do all of that, however it is bad when they can affect our information security.

I have gone on record stating that for you and your customer’s piece of mind (as well as some laws), that you should fully encrypt your hard drives, recommending that the small business owners uses Truecrypt… a very effective solution. Now comes the (relatively) obvious news that you need to be wary of SSDs

If you’re in a business that handles sensitive information, or are just conscientious about your privacy, you might want to read this study on SSD erasure. As you know, there are ways of erasing traditional magnetic hard drives that are more or less totally irreversible. Writing all zeros, writing garbage, zeroing again, and so on. After a few cycles it’s fresh and clean.

via PSA: SSDs Are Difficult To Securely Erase.

So get the SSD encrypted as soon as you. How much this effects people who have Hybrids like my Momentus XT is probably minimal, but STILL present as you do not know exactly what data ends up on the 4GB Flash part. So Encrypt it now, and encrypt it early.

Moving on… upgrading the workhorse hard drive

This is a post specifically targeted for the small company freelancer, even an individual. You have your workhorse notebook, and you are running out of space on the old 160GB HDD but cannot afford downtime. One alternative is to purchase a second notebook (not a bad idea to be honest!) with the much larger HDD that you need, but that does not get around the upheaval of the move to new kit so is there an alternative? We also have to note that although you may be technically proficient, you may not be the total geek that is au fait with the inside of a laptop or a wiz with the software.

The alternative is to just replace the Hard drive. Modern laptops (most of them that is) generally allow very easy access to the hard drive through either 1, 2 or 3 screws. This sounds horrific but is today an extremely easy thing to do, particularly as most 2.5″ Hard drives fit most most laptops and you can also check the dimensions of your old laptop and compare them to the new one on most websites. But what of the OS and data? That is easy as well as most hard disk manufacturers have special versions of disk cloning software specifically to allow you to do this task. So what are the steps (for Windows users only :-) ).

0. Always the first step – make sure all your DATA is BACKED UP! Of course, this is already done as you ensure you have backups all the time

1. Identify your existing HDD manufacturer and type by using Device Manager and looking for the Disk Drive properties. There is normaly a long sequence of letters and numbers that are normally very descriptive. For example mine is now ST95005620AS which can be looked up using Google to find out that it is a Seagate Momentus XT 500MB 7200 rpm Hybrid drive

2. Use the best specifications you can find to compare the dimensions of this drive with the new one you wish to buy. It is a good idea to actually keep to the same manufacturer sometimes, particularly if your machine is very compact and tiny. Look for the new one with the right size and spin speed that you want. Make sure that the disk interfaces matches the one your laptop supports, for example SATA300

3. Order the Hard disk along with an external USB disk caddy that matches the disk interface of the HDD you have ordered. You will need this for the cloning of the old drive contents to the new and is also useful to turn your old drive into a backup drive.

4. If you are using Truecrypt or other Hard drive encryption, now decrypt your old drive. If you were not using Truecrypt, please shoot yourself now… you need it, and for reasons why look at my old posts about it. The decryption is only to ensure that there are no problems during the cloning and partition resizing.

5. When you have everything, go to the website of your new Hard drive and download the cloning software. Seagate have a nice rebadged HDD tool for example. Other cloning software can be used, but ensure that you get one that allows resizing of partitions as you are going to move your 160GB set of data to a 500GB or even 1TB drive and you don’t want to be left with two partitions now do you. Install the software on your notebook.

6. Get the new drive into the new disk caddy, and connect it to your laptop.

7. Use the software from the disk manufacturer to clone the drive to the new USB connected HDD (taking great care with the instructions about what drive is the source and which drive is the destination). Once finished (and it will almost certainly require reboots doing exactly what the software says on screen), you can then shutdown the notebook and disconnect the new drive. Note that unless you do something wrong with regard to the source/destination, you will alway be able to go back to the old drive :-) . THIS WILL TAKE HOURS, sometimes as long as five hours depending upon the size of the old drive.

8. Using the screwdriver, remove the old drive and replace it with the new drive. Once everything is back together, power on the notebook and the golden test will be that everything boots up fine and you should then be able to login as if nothing has happened. Note that in all the ones I have done previously, at no time has Windows required to be re-authorised.

9. Bed in the new system for a few days (taking great pleasure in your newly available space) and then re-encrypt with Truecrypt. You can now use the old drive in the USB disk caddy as a back-up drive, remembering to delete and recreate/format new partitions on the USB connected drive.

10. Simples as the Meerkat is always saying.

Of course, you can always use the upgrade as an excuse to re-install the OS and apps from scratch, which is a noble way of doing things. This is actually quite good if you have the time, as you can always drop back to your old drive if things are not as good as you want them to be.

Portable Storage on the Road

I use a variety of different storage mechanisms on the road, what with online backup, file synchronisation and online storage locations… as well as the huge amount of storage that even the most basic laptop provides these days. My old netbook went through the upgrade from 80GB to 250GB which effectively meant unlimited amounts of normal storage as I have not come close to using that up even when loading up on music (for the road) and every photo I have ever taken (I have owned a digital camera since 1998). My current netbook has a 160GB which is still pretty meaty (particularly once I had done the partition shuffle to convert the dual partition to a single one… I am not a fan of data stored in its own partition, as I lose flexibility to make use of all my storage and I use sync to ensure my data is always recoverable). However sometimes you need that separate storage, separate from the main partition for on the road backup (for extra safety) or for dealing with the transfer of some of the big super media files (>50GB) that occasionally I have to deal with.

Freecomxxs320 This is where I come to my latest favourite, the Freecom XXS 320GB. This is a tiny 2.5” device that is as simple as simple can be. It is essentially a rubber cased bare harddrive with an attached USB2 Interface. It has a good low cost/size of storage ratio (less than €100 for 320GB) and is speedy enough, and the cost aspect is very important. This is because when travelling, the failure rate for HDs is very high even when they are supposed to be robust. This unit is replaceable… an effective property. The rubber casing makes it reasonably robust still though, so I do not expect this to fail too quickly, and this so easily gets dropped into my flight bag. The other thing is, the sleek black rubber just looks cool. You really do want something like this when you are away from home, particularly for taking that extra addition of media for long evenings stuck in hotel rooms with CNN for company.