Hello, why do ssd and hdd drives are securely erased differently? How can I unfrozen a ssd to do the secure erase? Thx

Hello DirtyDeeds.

I am unsure of your objective. An ssd is simply a storage device based on solid state as opposed to magnetic / moving parts technology. For the most part, an operating system will view and operate on these in the same manner.

Could you please explain the "difference" you are experiencing ?

Thx.

As stated mechanical hard drives have a magnetic platter where the data is stored. Secure erase typically overwrites the same area several times with 0s,1s and/or random which essentially creates a constant field so data can not be recovered.

In a nutshell SSD uses flash memory which is a special type of Electronic Erasable Programmable Read only Memory (EEPROM). They have a limited number of writes so a special wear leveling program is used so that one cell does not fail out faster. This means that a hard drive secure erase utility can not access all the memory and puts access write cycles on the drive. SSDs have a built in command that resets all memory back to the same state.

What do you mean by frozen SSD? Is it a SSD or just a flash drive? What errors are you seeing? Do you know the drive's manufacture? How old is the drive? It could mean that the drive is worn out or the drive controller has failed.

I've had many flash drives fail and some just become read only and others start having I/O errors and finally become completely inaccessible.

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Good to know - thx michaelk.

There has been some discussion about ssd's having data saved in areas that the wear leveling has locked out. Not sure there is an easy way to clean that area. You'd have to unlock the ram and then wipe it. Even electronic ram may have residual and if one were to look at crypto level security then they'd be worried about the data in those areas.

The solution would be to physically destroy the drive to secure it.

Here is the article I read on secure erase ssd
https://www.unixmen.com/secure-erase-your-ssd/

This will explain the frozen part.

It's a bit late for me to go digging but the linked-to article looks like it was written about 10 years ago by somebody who had no idea what they were talking abut then.
The whole "the installer will write zeros and degrade the SSD" is just too moronic for words.

I guess I should always look at the date on the article first before doing anything. Perhaps this was for the early generations of ssd drives.

I'm not sure if the newer gen ssd requires these steps.

In the ATA/SATA command set there is a security subset of commands. One of them is SECURITY_ERASE_UNIT. Once the drive receives that command, it begins erasing itself with zeroes. Even if the interface cable is removed from the drive, it will keep erasing itself.

There is also a command called ENHANCED_SECURITY_ERASE_UNIT that writes random characters over the drive. When a drive is frozen, none of the security subset can be changed. But the drive is automatically unfrozen each power cycle.

So, to unfreeze a drive, you hot cycle it. Some machine have freeze built into the BIOS, so drive security commands won't work.

In order to security erase you need a utility. Most SSD manufacturers provide this type of utility, whereas most HDD manufacturers do not. BXDR is a utility for the security subset of ATA commands. But even with it, you still must sometimes hot cycle the drive to unfreeze it.

I think you can also perform security erase with hdparm.

I found a command that does the unfreezing and I tested it. First, I ran hdparm -I /dev/sda and it was frozen.
Then, I ran pm-suspend and it put my computer in some shutdown state. I press a key on the keyboard to bring it back on.

I did the hdparm again and the ssd was not frozen. So pm-suspend does unfreezes a ssd drive.

I didn't secure erase it yet, as the root filesystem is mounted. I have to use a livedvd to do this.

On your machine the suspend will unfreeze the drive. That may not be true on all machines. But after you unfreeze the drive, before you can run security erase, you have to lock the drive. Unless you have a manufacturer's utility that does everything in one step.

Just a comment, here ... I've learned a lot from this thread ...

I hadn't the slightest notion of anything to do with frozen or locked SSD drives and very little knowledge concerning secure erase or the real differences between how solid state and magnetic technology handle it.

So ... my apologies to the OP, DirtyDeeds, for my early simplistic post in this thread. To use the old cliché, I didn't know what I didn't know ... ;-) ... Big time. Thanks as well to the rest of the kind members here who had the knowledge and shared it for the OP and the rest of us.

Cheers to all - happy weekend !

Apologies, I was too quick to criticise here.
I take it the situation being typed about is when the installer is preparing to encrypt a partition on a previously used SSD and attempts to overwrite with 0s. I still believe that it wouldn't cause much wear as the 0s would just be swallowed up by the device firmware but, perhaps, if one did have some sensitive data it may still remain.
However, I've yet to see any indication that anybody but governments and well-funded and very bright individuals are capable of retrieving data from an SSD by bypassing the controller so I think that this is only an issue if your data is worth millions or you're expecting a visit from a government agency who won't find the fact you managed to securely erase your data as suspicious as your happening to download "The Art Of Deception".

that's the sort of random teenage backyard video that makes us love youtube!