[mrbill]

Not by a long shot! Put in there by the friend who threw together a working system for me from the ones he had lying around.

A lot of those original sub-gigabyte drives in the slabs eventually went out with bad bearings (oh my the screeching sounds...)

We had a few Turbo Color slabs at an ISP that I worked for in the late 90s that had been acquired from a surplus place; they had "PROPERTY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY" stickers on them and had been stripped of RAM and HDs of course.

[compuguy]

I still don't understand why they strip memory from machines from a classified setting. Once powered off, the data is only recoverable for a short time.

[avn2109]

Actually this might be evidence in favor of the claim that the NSA has fancy methods for RAM data recovery.

[flukus]

Just in case? If a technique was developed to get information off it tomorrow it would take months/years for department policy to catch up.

It could also be a hold over from when memory wasn't so volatile.

[shakna]

> Once powered off, the data is only recoverable for a short time

It comes down to defence-in-depth.

That short time is usually between seconds and minutes.

A can of compressed air can extend it a bit, but a dip in liquid nitrogen can turn the dial up a long way. Other techniques may appear in the future.

You need to trust that one of your own people won't do any tampering to extend the RAM. Much easier to verify there isn't any on the way out the door.

[grzm]

Why risk it?

[jmount]

Simple (and good policy). Defends against unknown attacks like additional circuits hidden in the ram and so on.