Asklemmy

43866 readers

1571 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

111

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

submitted 6 months ago by User_already_exist@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

73 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

[+] Greg@lemmy.ca -13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Fill the drive 100% using data duplicator then delete everything on the drive. Repeat a few times to ensure you scrub all blocks. There is no need to physically destroy the drive.

edit: fair criticism of this approach in cases when the data is unencryptd and the hard drives has bad blocks. I just wanted to give a counter to the destroying hardware approach which isn't necessary warranted

[–] ramble81@lemm.ee 23 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That doesn’t work with SSDs anymore. Their controllers map “bad” blocks which are put in an RO state and writes no longer go there but data still exists. There is usually a buffer of extra space so you do see the capacity loss, but if you bypass the controller you can still read the data there.

[–] Greg@lemmy.ca 0 points 6 months ago

That's fair, I can appreciate an attack vector in cases where there are bad blocks and the drive was unencrypted. Luckily bad blocks are less common with modern SSDs and assuming the disk was encrypted, a few bad blocks are unlikely to expose any contents. So knowing the number of bad blocks and what data was stored would inform if a fill and empty approach would be suitable to sanitize the drive.