Are flash drives or CD's or DVDs susceptible to EMP or CME's effects?

Question

My concern is the vulnerablities of these types of storage devices to these forces or whether a Faraday Cage is really the only protection available.

Answer 1

Flash drives are electronic media, therefore they are vulnerable.

DVD and CD disks are NOT vulnerable. They are permently written to by a laser burning a hole in an aluminum disk in the sub strata of the CD/DVD.

To test your theroy try this: Take a magnet and pass it over a formated floppy, then pass it over a cd.

Results:
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As for the Faraday Cage I do not know of any public infomation on the tests that have done. It is possible that it may work. Creating an EM Pulse is a very dangerous and expensive experiment.

Hope this answers your question.....

Answer 2

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Are flash drives or CD's or DVDs susceptible to EMP or CME's effects?
My concern is the vulnerablities of these types of storage devices to these forces or whether a Faraday Cage is really the only protection available.

Answer 3

Flash Drives = Yes they can be completely erased by an EMP because it will cause the internal battery to fail and all the data on the memory within will be lost.

CD's + DVD's = No they are not magnetic storage devices and will not be harmed by EMP's as the data is actually imprinted on them. They can be harmed by scratches for sure though.

Not really sure about CME's but I suspect the same goes for them.

Good Luck HTH.

Answer 4

Technically, CD-ROM will not read DVD. But many times any optical drive is called "cd-rom" so in reality you might have a DVD. The best bet is to try to put some DVD in it. If it will recognize some files on it (any files), then you have a DVD-ROM, not CD-ROM.

Answer 5

I think they are susceptible to EMF forces. They do go bad now and then.