Magnetic USB FOB cover?

I have an 8 GB USB fob which was handed out to senior company workers by FABRIS of Canada. It's metal and the cap seems to have a magnetic attraction to the body of the fob. I see no problem with this as the media is not erased by magnetism. Also the only attraction seems to be between the fob and the cap. If you are uber paranoid, toss it in the bin. Or keep it and keep it isolated from other magnetic media.

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uber-obsessive.. so I did that.. I took it out of my USB box and put it with pencils.. much obliged

*+-Or keep it and keep it isolated from other magnetic media.

- = - Vasos Panagiotopoulos, Columbia'81+, Reagan, Mozart, Pindus, BioStrategist

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On 5/8/2011 11:08 PM snipped-for-privacy@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com spake thus:

Still wondering what made you think a magnet would affect an EPROM (or is it EEPROM?) like that in any way. Maybe you're just used to dealing with magnetic storage media?

Now, if you took the thing with you into a MRI machine, I guess all bets would be off, but otherwise ...

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Nobody has used floppy disks for quite some time now, and nothing else is really vulnerable. Hard drives are not. Maybe the strip in your credit cards if it got loose in your pocket with some cards.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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It's a specif type of EEPROM than can be addressed (read/write) by blocks. The old EEPROM had to be erased all at once then reprogrammed. Like the BIOS in a PC. When you update it, the addressable part is completely erased and then written with fresh data even though it's just adding some features and replacing some buggy code.

But you are correct. It would take a lot of EMI energy to corrupt data on a EEPROM.

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t s

the old airport security x-rays used to 'reset' [scramble data] eeproms ...had a friend learn the hard way on a trip to demo software in Japan

=3D -

gist

tm

.}---

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depending on the coercivity of the media, 'weak' magnetic fields won't affect the sotrage much, at all. but those new rare-earth magnets will do a lot of damage to the data and don't have to get very close.

Yep I would consider that a substantial amount more EMI/RFI than a mere magnetic cap on a modern flash FOB.

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