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What should be done to completely wipe clean a solid state drive (before selling a computer)? What should be done for a regular drive, and what considerations apply to a SSD?
So long as the discussion is about using *x tools (Linux/Unix ..), whats special about erasing solid state drives?
SSD's use wear leveling technology which means that the data is not always stored in neat contiguous blocks and also that a delete instruction may only mark the space as free for re-use but do nothing to the original data so potentially its possible to read evey bit of storage and then re-assemble the data.
Writing a single file over the whole SSD should in theory clear all the data although I read somewhere that even doing that may not be 100% effective on an SSD.
For both HD and SSD writing random data in the file is probably more effective than writing a single character repeatedly.
...whats special about erasing solid state drives?
well,
mechanical drives are mechanical, and the head doesn't move over exactly the same path every time, therefore it is at least theoretically possible that be re-reading the same blocks several times you might be able to get back some data that was there previously. While this does not apply to SSDs, it is the reason (whether practically realisable and useful, or not) that multiple overwriting is regarded as necessary when erasing mechanical hard drives. This, therefore may be an unnecessary distraction for an SSD drive.
SSDs don't immediately make all of the storage locations available to the user; because there is a well known wear out effect, there are spare cells; the controller manages swapping cells out so that the cells that see heavy use don't wear out. This means that there may be 'hidden' cells and, if those cells have been used, they may contain previous data
The normal answer is to put rotating 1 and 0 to each bit at least 9 times.
dd command with options tend to be used. Or copy file over and over until the drive is full then do it over and over.
You can't pull the old VHS eraser trick on ssd's.
For the most part a few different partitions would prevent most people from any real access.
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