Asklemmy

43968 readers

1546 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

112

How do I wipe a modern SSD to prevent data recovery? (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by User_already_exist@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

75 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I understand traditional methods don’t work with modern SSD, anyone knows any good way to do it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

No. Most SSDs actually contain far more storage internally than the SSD controller exposes. They then even out the wear and tear of the flash memory “packages” by cycling through the various packages and, given there being more packages than actually exposed for use, this offers a level of redundancy so the device lasts longer.

Because of this, wiping the logical device (e.g. zero filling or writing random data multiple times) doesn’t actually guarantee every storage package is written to / overwritten. Thus data may still reside even after wiping (that can be accessed by reading the packages directly and skipping the controller which abstracts these packages into a virtual block device).

Some SSDs offer a secure wipe tool that does a low level wipe of every page or wipes out an encryption key and generates a new one but not every SSD on the market offers that feature.

From the company my org has used to decommission old hardware; an industrial grinder is sadly the most assured way to guarantee no data can be recovered.