Shredding on SSD

Tleilaxiomatic · 24 Mar 2011 at 11:14

Hi all, I have a question about SSD. There appear to be hardware issues using conventional shredding/file erase software with SSD. I have OCZ-VERTEX2 ATA SSD, does anybody know of any compatible file shredding utilities that will bypass the wear-level protection issue that SSD seem to have?

Regards
Tleilaxiomatic

Zarf · 24 Mar 2011 at 14:41

Pretty sure that a secure erase using HDDErase aught to do it.

Broken Hope · 24 Mar 2011 at 17:06

SSDs don't work like mechanical hard drives, erasing the same file over and over won't do anything, a single erase on that block should be the same.

Undesirable · 24 Mar 2011 at 17:35

I believe wear leveling means that attempting to overwrite files with any amount of random data will cause that data to be written to random unoccupied cells that don't necessarily belong to the file that you want to erase.

If Trim is enabled, then it is my understanding that files deleted normally without being securely overwritten will eventually be purged by the Trim command and thus be unrecoverable.

The only way to be sure may be to completely wipe the drive with zeroes and restore backups each time, which is impractical for single files.