Storage Media
File Sizes
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Storage Media

File Sizes

File sizes are like metric. I know we live in America but I know at least a few of you are STEM lawyers and persons in tech. Anyway, attention spans being what they are, here is a separate link to a primer on file sizes for when you have a moment. It is highly recommended.

Optical discs - CDs and DVDs

CDs and DVDs are both optical discs, and the “cd drive” in your computer is called an optical drive.

CDs can hold 650 MB of information (good for documents, smaller audio files, maybe rather small video files); DVDs can hold 4.7 GB of information.

There is a thing called a dual layer DVD, generally written as DVD-DL. Yeah you have to look at how it’s written on the thing and say it backwards. It holds 8.5 GB.

Blu-ray (“pronounced Blu ray,” says blu-ray.com) discs are also optical discs. They hold 25 GB or 50 GB. We don’t really use these, though.

USB 🖖. External Hard Drive

USBs are the things that until recently were most commonly called thumb drives by people. (Ok, they’re still pretty commonly called that, actually.) Some of the other names these things have had over the years may be familiar to those of us that were around for it - (USB) flash drive, USB key, jump drive, pen drive…

Common capacities available these days are 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256 GB.

External drives look like the thing below. They have much higher capacity than USBs, commonly ranging these days from 1 TB to 4 TB. Larger drives above 10 TB are available, but start to get expensive. We don’t often use ones bigger than 2 TB, though this sentence will probably say 4 TB pretty soon.

Currently,

• MDC no longer accepts optical discs, but they do accept external hard drives from us. They still do not accept USBs.

  • Discovery on external hard drives for clients at MDC should be sent with a cover letter to:

    Metropolitan Detention Center
    Legal Department
    Attn: Sophia Papapetru
    80 29th St
    Brooklyn, NY 11232

• Essex County Correctional Facility only accepts USBs.

  • Discovery on USBs for clients at Essex should be sent with a cover letter to:

    Warden Guy Cirillo
    Essex County Correctional Facility
    354 Doremus Avenue
    Newark, NJ 07105

    Avoid sending USBs in plain envelopes in the mail - USPS sorting machine can sometimes rip them out of the envelopes. Essex accepts Fedex to the warden.

  • The USAO will also send USBs to clients in Essex. Note, however, they will send the drive in a password encrypted format, which may be harder to use for some clients. The McAfee encryption software which they are still using is just awful.

• Westchester County Jail (“Valhalla”) accepts discovery on external hard drives from the USAO only.

  • Quote from an ausa, Aug. 2022 — “Apparently, in theory, Valhalla has been moving toward accepting thumb drives, but they are not quite there yet or it is not working right.”

• Hudson County Jail accepts USBs.

• Rikers accepts USBs and external hard drives.

  • Mail to:
    Michael Veal
    NYC DOC Legal Divison
    75-20 Astoria Blvd, Suite 305
    East Elmhurst, NY 11370

  • Include (I guess you write a letter) your client’s name and their “book and case” number.

• MDC Legal and the Warden’s Office at Essex accept drives from us by Fedex*; Hudson County does not.

External hard drives are pretty much always called external hard drives, or external drives. As you may have noted, there is technical or official use terminology (optical drive) and often varying common use terminology (cd drive).

As you may also note, not everyone is necessarily up on even or in full agreement always on the common terms. Getting a sense of the distinction between USBs and external drives should be helpful, though, for communicating with the government about discovery delivery logistics. And again, it’s also helpful to have an understanding of file sizes.

Always reach out to the tech folk any moment you have questions about any of this kind of stuff.

(*There’s saved recipients for MDC Legal and the Essex Warden in our Fedex. (Guy Cirillo isn’t actually the warden there anymore but they don’t seem to care that I just keep putting that on the label and in the letter.))

What is This?

We sometimes receive these from the government. They are little USB things in card style so you can carry discovery in your wallet. Maybe like if you think this kind of thing is cool.

They open up like this.

As cool as convention trinkets as they are, they are actually crap USBs, and fiddly. You might wanna just pop off the USB part and keep it in a labeled envelope. They’re naked, but work the same as other USBs. Put it in one way, if it doesn’t work, flip it over and try again; generally takes a minimum of three tries.

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