The drive doesn't straight up expose the blocks to you, instead it gives you an array of blocks that you can see as a contiguous volume.
Another alternative is encrypted SSDs, change the password and all the data on them is essentially useless. Whether this actually works will be dependent on your SSD though. However, as mentioned above, what the OS sees is not all the blocks on the drive.ĪTA has a "secure wipe" command that will erase every block on the drive. You can only write to flash memory that's been erased, so to write to each byte on the drive you incidentally erased it first (multiple times, unnecessarily). In addition, byte level access is not possible, only block level access. And erasing it multiple times with a "DoD wipe" is just silly, flash memory doesn't have residual magnetism.įlash memory has three operations: erase, read and write. Further, the blocks you see from the perspective of the OS are not all of the blocks on the drive, there are extra blocks rotated in and out to spread the wear over the entire drive. This will work fine for hard drives, but SSDs are not erased by writing to them. I find it hard to believe "Enhanced is the most secure version of secure erase by writing random bits to the entire drive multiple times." when both standard and enhanced take a similar amount of time to finish. Performing a Secure Erase on your drive is destructive and should be used cautiously because it will make it extremely difficult to nearly impossible to read the data on the drive. This ensures that none of the data will be salvageable. Enhanced is the most secure version of secure erase by writing random bits to the entire drive multiple times. Although the data will still exist on the NAND, the controller will see no data. Standard Secure Erase will delete the map of the SSDs controller. There are two levels of Secure Erase: standard and enhanced. It also said enhanced secure erase actually erases the data.Įdit: I actually read that in a PNY FAQ: This would mean some data could be recovered by taking the flash chips off the SSD and reading them.
I once read a PNY manual which said secure erase only erases pointers to the data. I'm not convinced that it can be trusted though. The best thing? The base model is only $20 $5!.ĭo you know a related subreddit? We'd love to know. Welcome to /r/raspberry_pi, a subreddit for discussing the raspberry pi credit card sized, ARM powered computer, and the glorious things we can do with it. Pi project ideas: There's a huge list right here on this sub!
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