gHacks technology news » usb drives http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:29:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 USB Flash Drives Cleaner http://www.ghacks.net/2009/08/19/usb-flash-drives-cleaner/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/08/19/usb-flash-drives-cleaner/#comments Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:53:35 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=15531 USB Driver Fresher has been designed to clean USB flash drives automatically when they are plugged into the computer system the software program is running on. The program uses rules to automatically scan and clean files and folders on USB flash drives. There are several situations where this might come in handy. Some operating systems do automatically create files and folders, for example a thumbs.db file, .Spotlight-V100, .ds_store or .trashes folders. While it has been designed to clean these files and folders it can be used for other purposes as well as the rules are flexible enough to cleanup all files and folders that might be stored on the USB flash drive.

usb flash drives cleaner

Existing rules can be modified or removed and new rules added. Supported are file and folders names plus the wildcard. It is theoretically possible to clean all files that are stored on USB flash drives by adding a *.* rule. This could be interesting for users who have to clean a lot of USB flash drives or want to work with empty drives on a specific computer system.

The software program will run hidden and cleanup connected USB flash drives automatically. These settings can be changed in the options of the program so that a confirmation is required before the data is deleted on connected USB flash drives.

USB Drive Fresher is a free software program for the Windows operating system. It is available for download at the developer’s website. Supported operating systems are Windows XP, Windows Vista and several other Microsoft operating system. It is likely that the program will also run under Windows 7.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/08/19/usb-flash-drives-cleaner/feed/ 1 USB Flash Drives: USB Vaccine http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/06/usb-flash-drives-usb-vaccine/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/06/usb-flash-drives-usb-vaccine/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:17:01 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=10971 Panda Security has released a new security software program that increases the security of usb flash drives. The portable software program called USB Vaccine provides the means to vaccinate both the computer system and usb flash drives.

Computer vaccination referring to disabling autorun completely from removable media like usb flash drives or optical drives like CDs or DVD drives. To enable the protection of the computer system from programs that are auto-executed if usb flash drives or CDs or DVDs are inserted into the computer drives.

A click on vaccinate computer will immediately disable autorun on the computer system. The USB drive vaccination option on the other hand will disable autorun from selected usb flash drives. The drives have to be connected to the computer system before the computer can be protected. Every connected usb flash drive will be listed in a pulldown menu. A click on vaccinate usb will prevent autorun from being executed from that usb flash drive.

It should be noted that it is not possible to undo the autorun protection of a selected usb flash drive in the computer system using the security software. Another limitation is that it will only work on usb flash drives that have been formatted with the FAT or FAT32 file system.

usb flash drives

Panda Research USB Vaccine increases the security of a computer system in regards to usb flash drives and other media with autorun capabilities. The security software has been tested under Windows Vista, Windows XP and even Windows 2000. It will work on all

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/06/usb-flash-drives-usb-vaccine/feed/ 6 Test the Speed of your USB Flash Drives http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/07/test-the-speed-of-your-usb-flash-drives/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/07/test-the-speed-of-your-usb-flash-drives/#comments Sat, 07 Jun 2008 20:05:40 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=4899 The speed difference of USB Flash Drives that support the USB 2.0 standard can be more than 15 MB/s with maximum speeds of about 30 MB/s for fast drives. That’s still less than modern hard drives are capable of but better than a few years ago. I think it’s really astonishing that there are only a few recent comparisons of USB flash drive speeds available on the first results pages of Google. A recent (another one) comparison from May 2008 that tested seven USB flash drives showed differences of more than 15 MB/s between the fastest and slowed drive while copying files of a certain size

If you already have an USB flash drive and want to know how it compares you can test the speed of it with the free version of HD Tune which can benchmark USB drives as well. The free version will only test the read speed and access time but it should give a good impression of the capabilities of the device at hand.

To make the test accurate you should set the test speed to Accurate in the benchmark options. The last two steps are to select the USB flash drive from the pulldown menu at the top and to click on start to start the benchmark.

hdtune benchmark

Those speed differences are really interesting. It’s probably a good idea to research USB flash drives extensively before buying one. What’s your experience with those drives ?

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/07/test-the-speed-of-your-usb-flash-drives/feed/ 5 Autorun Eater http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/22/autorun-eater/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/22/autorun-eater/#comments Thu, 22 May 2008 08:54:37 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=4226 One common strategy to infect a computer is to use the autorun information of a removable drive, most likely an USB device, to infect the computer as soon as the user double-clicks the drive. If the computer is protected by antivirus software the attack will most likely be stopped in its tracks but the manipulated autorun.inf file on the USB device will more often than not remain untouched.

Here is a short explanation if you have never heard of autorun.inf files before: It contains information about files and processes that are automatically executed when a disk is inserted or double-clicked. Autorun is often confused with autoplay but they are not the same. Autorun is directly related to the autorun.inf file on the disk while autoplay automatically reacts to new devices or media, for example a music CD is automatically played in Windows when inserted.

Autorun Eater takes care of autorun.inf files before it can be executed on the system. This is done my actively monitoring the system in real time. It will automatically remove suspicious autorun.inf files and store them in a secure space in case of a false positive.

I know that some of you do not like to run a lot of programs in the background which is also my preferred way. It is possible to disable the autorun.inf system wide which is the only protection that works flawlessly. The common Registry keys NoDriveAutoRun and NoDriveTypeAutoRun do not eliminate the dangers of autorun.inf files. When properly configured they prevent that the autorun.inf file on USB devices gets executed automatically but it will still be executed when a user double-clicks the drive.

The only real autorun.inf protection which disables it completely is the following Registry setting. Just copy the following lines into a text document and name it auto.reg.

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\Autorun.inf]
@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"

Double-click that file and restart your computer afterwards. Autorun should now be disabled for all drives on your system.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/22/autorun-eater/feed/ 8 How to disable USB Drives http://www.ghacks.net/2006/04/28/how-to-disable-usb-drives/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/04/28/how-to-disable-usb-drives/#comments Fri, 28 Apr 2006 14:36:20 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/04/28/how-to-disable-usb-drives/ It is sometimes a good choice to disable USB drives and still use other USB hardware. This is especially true for computers and notebooks that are publically accessible from time to time. So, to disable USB Drives you simply fire up regedit and browse to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor

The value START determines if USB drives are disabled or not, if the value is set to 4 USB drives are disabled, if it is set to 3 they are enabled.

source: intelliadmin

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