In case you can’t wait for your flash memory to die from write cycling, TeamGroup now has a drive that, via software or hardware, can destroy its own flash chips with a surge of voltage. If you wonder why you might want this, there are military applications where how you destroy a piece of equipment is right up there in the manual with how to use it.

They have obviously put a lot of thought into it, as you can see in the video below. Apparently, if you are in the middle of blowing up the flash and power cuts out, the chip will resume frying itself when you restore power.

According to reports, the chip takes about ten seconds and, Mission Impossible style, it emits smoke as it takes itself out.

So, the obvious question for you is: what would you build with such a thing? A place to store your passwords? Or your cooked accounting? The security revolves around you telling it to destroy itself. That’s fine if you have time.

But we wonder how useful this would be against a motivated adversary. After all, you could unplug it and plug it into something else that doesn’t know how to send the “fry yourself” command. Then don’t push the button. It seems like it would be better to require a challenge/response with a cryptography key and, without it, you fry yourself after a certain number of failures. Or are we just paranoid?

Not the first time this has come up, by the way. Maybe these will be the new way to distribute protected media.

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