Reply to post: Re: seriously??

Re: seriously??

And how does that NZ$80-120 compare to your hourly rate, given that trying to disinfect and verify it's gone is something you can spend a long time on ?

Since you're going to be re-imaging the machine anyway, the time is actually nil. It takes moments to re-write the partition table, and unless you wish to go to the effort of running recovery tools, creating a new table effectively wipes all data on the drive.

Even in a small company if you can show the person with the chequebook that it's clearly saving money, they should either scare up the cash, or you should look to find somewhere who will be able to pay the next payroll.

Seems you picked an appropriate name, since you seem to be quite mad. Do you know what "SMB" is? Well, most commonly they're <u>SMALL</u> businesses of 1-5 people, though I'm not sure what qualifies as "medium". As such, they often have only one person involved anyway. How is that person going to complain to whoever handles the payroll, stand in front of a mirror?

As to quitting a perfectly good job because they won't buy a new HDD when the old is perfectly OK, do you not know what the job markets are like for most of the world especially IT these days?

You might need to spend some time elsewhere - like in the real world for example - before you speak to much on such subjects.

Also, yes, the possibility of the drive firmware being tampered with by a virus is now non-zero, so nothing you do through the SATA interface can be trusted absolutely, including reflashing the drive's firmware.

Given that, and your statement that the drive should be replaced because you cannot trust it once it's had an infection, how often do you think we should replace the drives? Hourly? Every 10 minutes? As soon as they're flashed they're untrustworthy? Because there's no way of knowing if a drive is OK after all. Maybe the manufacturer has an as-yet undiscovered issue. Maybe there's something somewhere else on my network that I haven't yet spotted (I don't have the time to be hunting it and as you say I cannot be sure even when I really am sure)? Maybe someone infected a HDD at MS and their updates are now malware [no comments on the obvious redundancy!]? Maybe some new (or old) driveby in a popular website that is yet undetected - perhaps just reading this comment you've stumbled on a drive-by infecting El Reg that has now infected your drive's firmware. Better replace it just in case.

Or is my over-stressed coffee-lacking day taking it's toll on me today?