You raise an interesting thought about the x-ray does though. High doses of radiation can cause "soft errors" in volatile solid-state storage (e.g. computer RAM) and in non-volatile, non-magnetic, solid-state storage (e.g. flash cards used in mp3 players, digital cameras, many embedded devices). Soft errors corrupt data but don't damage the device. It's a serious concern for orbital and deep-space electronics and a growing concern for general-purpose stuff because the smaller transistors are more susceptible to ambient radiation such as cosmic rays and natural radioactive decay.
I wonder if anyone has done a study on the probability of soft-errors due to high (CTX-level) x-ray doses in today's and projected-future flash card technology. Personally I'd worry about that much more than the magnetic media.
This is interesting. I have a very demanding travel scheduled with my job and have noticed that my USB jump drive and the additional 256MB memory in my MP3 player which uses a Smart Media card (flash memory) is having all kinds of problems. The Smart Media card went nuts a few months ago and I can not get any computer to recognize it anymore. My jump drive has to be reformatted all the time before you use it, otherwise the computer will not recognize it. I wonder if putting the devices through the x-ray machine at the check points is causing these problems?
