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

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 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.