Now you might think that when you delete a file,
or especially if you format or wipe an entire drive,
whether it's a hard drive or an SSD like this one,
that that data is just gone.
But in actuality, if you were to properly delete
every single file that you deleted from your computer,
it would bear a significant cost,
both in terms of time,
because you would have to actually take time
out of your drive's busy schedule running your OS
or your games or whatever else
to write ones or zeros to that entire portion of the drive
and in terms of durability, especially with SSDs,
which only have a finite number of times
that they can be written.
So the way this actually works is either in the MBR or GPT,
which is the GYD partition table,
the entry for the file gets deleted,
but the actual data stays
until it's incidentally overwritten.
So what that means is if you were ever going to
recycle a computer drive
or if you were gonna give a computer away to a friend,
you need to make sure that all of your selfies,
and I really do mean all of them,
have been properly deleted from your machine.
And that, excuse me, is where today's product comes in.
This is the RedKey USB,
which allows you to quickly and easily wipe any computer.
And also we'll probably be showing you guys
a free way to do this because this is sort of
unnecessary, but free-ish, all right.
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So let's start by taking a look at what's in here.
So supposedly we should just plug this in
and it'll give us its own little screen
and it'll start wiping.
So this is actually the original RedKey USB.
This is funny.
I don't know what to make of this guy.
So it's a Kickstarter that did apparently deliver
to its backers, really, really small campaign.
I think they only raised about like $11,000
or something like that.
And then the site is now down in spite of the fact
that the only instructions I can find for how to update,
and your RedKey includes lifetime updates,
are going to their site and downloading the latest updates,
although they're working on an online updater
for the new one, but then the site doesn't work at all.
So I don't know how their online updater is gonna work.
Anyway, they've got a new campaign
that actually ends in like 36 hours.
It just took us this long to get to this.
I don't know where I'm going with this.
Let's just screw it.
Let's try it.
What is this?
I guess just for packaging to keep it.
Oh, just to keep it in there?
Yeah.
So the BlueKey is nothing.
This is just a 16 gig key.
So actually, you know what?
Jake can use this one to make like our free version.
Well, about that,
I was thinking about using a tool called D-band,
but I found that that's only for hard drives.
And then I was looking for a free SSD alternative,
and it doesn't really seem like there's a lot
unless you just get the tool from your SSD's manufacturer.
Like Corsair has a tool, Samsung has a tool,
Kingston has a tool, but it's not showing up.
And with those tools, you can secure a race.
And then there's also in Windows,
if you just reset, like you can show them right now,
it'll give you the option to securely reset the PC,
which we assume is a similar kind of tool.
So maybe we should try that out.
Keep my files, remove everything, click that.
Let's do it.
Well, we got an extra drive here, so.
See, remove files and clean the drive.
This might take a few hours.
This won't take long.
You're sending me real mixed messages here, Windows.
Oh God, we're just doing it?
I thought we were.
You told me to do it.
I guess so, we're doing it, it's fine.
We have an extra drive to try this.
Well, now we have to let this run.
Yeah.
Well, it's actually doing something now.
Yeah, that's good.
Okay, so now while this one continues to run,
I think we're probably at like 10% or something.
I don't know.
We're gonna go ahead and we're gonna try our red key
on our second test bench.
So you can see here, we've got our pictures,
including the ones we don't want anyone to see.
And we're just gonna shut the system down.
We're gonna pop this in here.
Why are they so hairy, David?
Because grown men have hair, Jake.
Okay.
Yeah.
We'll find out one day.
Oh.
Wow.
You know, just because you can grow a nice beard, David,
not everyone can do that.
Voice crack, damn it.
Do you remember what their key is?
F2?
F11?
Delete?
EVGAs?
No, I just want the boot menu.
Okay, well, it would have been F8 then,
but I think I'm already gonna go into the box.
Hey!
Yay!
Got it.
All right.
So I'm gonna go with non UEFI, probably.
I think it restarted.
Oh, no.
There we go.
Okay, loading.
Please wait.
Okay, here we go.
Oh God.
Okay.
Warning.
This device will erase the contents of any disc detected.
Wipe will commence automatically after 60 seconds.
That's actually pretty handy.
Yeah.
You can click F1 and start now.
I'm gonna reset the timer.
Wait, wait, wait.
Should we see the advanced menu?
Yeah.
F6.
So if you remember the keys,
or if you have the manual nearby, then-
Look, we don't have much time here.
You actually don't need the GUI.
Where is it?
Do they actually not just have all this in here?
We're running out of time here.
Here it is.
Check that out.
Main screen.
Wiping screen.
You may hear audio beeps during the last 10 seconds
of the countdown timer
if your computer has a built-in speaker.
Okay.
F6 advanced.
Boop.
We'll erase the contents of any disc detected.
Method random.
Scramble.
Okay.
Oh, it's got like government standards.
That's pretty cool.
Department of Defense.
Gutman.
Seven random pass methods.
Dang.
33 random pass methods.
That's the like, yeah data.
Zeroing.
Let's do zeroing.
Well, random's the default.
Okay, we'll do randoming.
All right.
One round.
Or should we just go back and then click start?
Let's go back.
Let's do the default.
F3.
Cancel.
Damn it.
That's weird.
I got you.
Oh, you got it.
Nevermind.
So I guess we should wait so we can hear the beeps, hey?
And we're back.
We said with 10 seconds remaining.
Oh, really?
Do we wanna wait the 35 seconds?
Yeah, yeah.
I wanna experience this.
I don't think this has a speaker built in.
Yeah, it's not gonna do it.
There's a speaker header right here.
Okay, I started it.
Okay, so queued discs.
It found our disc.
And remaining time, two and a half hours.
Oh.
Cool.
Good thing we used a one terabyte drive with this one.
Good thing we did one pass.
Pretty cool.
Three o'clock, okay.
It'd be done just before the end of the day.
Why don't we go do the,
why don't we go do the smart your garage door video then?
Whoa.
So we're back.
Our data is wiped.
We can remove the red key and power off the machine.
So we need to put this SSD in a computer
and see if there's any data on it still.
Yes.
Reekabah.
Is it actually free?
Yeah.
The free version is free.
All right.
What sort of files are we trying to recover?
I mean, we're specifically looking for pictures,
which would be a much faster scan.
Yes, we could search for, do you wanna search for all?
Yeah, let's search for all.
It's gonna take a long time.
Yeah, this drive is blank AF.
So we're probably gonna have to set up,
make a partition and stuff.
Yeah, it wouldn't happen.
Yeah, there we go.
No files were found.
Would you like to scan again with deep scan enabled?
No, this can take over an hour on a large drive.
Well, it's not that large of a drive.
Okay.
23 files, yeah.
Oh, interesting.
This device irrecoverably destroys data,
so we should not be able to find anything.
I don't know if that's just like the boot record stuff.
Yeah, it seems likely,
cause it's also at 0%.
So we might just have to leave that.
Should we check the Windows thing then?
Uh, yeah.
That's gonna take a little longer to scan, I reckon.
Well, let's throw it on my computer.
Oh, this might not actually be plugged in.
Moderately important.
Oh, there's your problem.
Yeah, he does this professionally.
So our first drive, the one that we hit with the red key,
that one's over there,
and we're trying to see if we can find
any remnants of data on it.
Then we grabbed the other one
that we used the Windows tool on,
and we're gonna go ahead and see if,
I don't know, we can find,
I mean, I guess specifically those pictures.
We're just gonna deep scan it right off the bat here.
For photos, or did you just do any files?
Any files, any files.
We're gonna get a lot of files.
Okay, so we'll come back in an hour.
Yeah, but we're gonna have a list of 100,000 files.
Yeah, but we know what they're called.
Okay.
Sure, sure.
We're looking for the news folder.
We're looking for the news folder, all right.
Seven hours later, we are finally done.
So this one actually went quite quickly,
and it found a fair number of things
that were either partially or fully overwritten,
but were still here.
With that said, our photos are not.
Pretty much everything here is like
some kind of Windows junk.
Like it's all from the Windows.
Windows folder.
For an average person, this seems fine,
but it also assumes that your computer is still functioning,
which is where the red key comes in.
I'm gonna be honest with you guys.
I was actually expecting to kind of trash on this,
because I was like, what, 45 bucks for a USB key.
Like, what are you, you know,
there's free utilities, blah, blah, blah.
And honestly, there are utilities out there,
but one of the ones that we found
that was somewhat feature comparable was $10.
And then you have to provide your own USB drive.
And this one is like, it's just dead simple to use.
So here's our result from the one terabyte drive.
We did actually manage to find seven files.
What even are they?
I don't know.
They're something, so something, so something dot FLVs.
And they are apparently excellent status.
So like we can go ahead and try to recover one of these.
But I can pretty much guarantee this is garbage.
Let's go ahead.
So do we have anything that can read a flash video?
Cannot render the file.
How big is the file?
600 megs.
Apparently.
Apparently, but like-
It could also just be recognizing random numbers
as an FLV.
Yeah.
I don't even think I had any FLVs on that drive.
Yeah, no, this is broken.
I think this is just garbage.
And that's only one pass.
So like bottom line then,
looks pretty good to me.
If you have to do it a lot, I mean-
Should we use it on James?
Yeah, should we just like go around
and wipe everyone's computers?
I think that would be quite the waste of money.
We're actually ending up with,
I think a recommendation here.
Yeah.
For like 45 bucks.
If you do more than just a little bit
of secure data erasing.
You might have to buy a couple.
I mean, yeah, there's gonna be command line utilities
that you can use to do this sort of thing.
But this is easy enough to use
that pretty much anyone could do it.
So looking pretty good to me.
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and like actually fulfilling it.
Like you might not even be able to buy it.
Haha, oops.
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