Erasing SSD's

K

kringle

New Member
Will eraser work effectively on solid state disks, and if not, will there be an effective way to wipe such disks in the future? I know these disks will gain in popularity once the capacities go up and the price begins to level out.
 
These are nonvolatile flash memory disks, right?

Joel
 
The concept is the same as the USB flash disks, just a lot bigger.

And see the discussion on why USB Flash Disks should not be erased in one of the stickies.
 
And see the discussion on why USB Flash Disks should not be erased in one of the stickies.
Click to expand...

Sorry for my misunderstanding but I thought the conclusion to those threads was that you could erase the free space as Eraser made a file to completely fill the free space so wear levelling etc didn’t come into play ?

I would like to know if this is right or not.

Thanks.
 
No idea. I wouldn't recommend erasing flash disks anyway because they have limited rewrite capacity.

There are always bad "sectors" which would not be erased yet files can be extracted. I think. No idea, I don't research such stuff... my duty is to make sure the code works lol

Joel
 
I wouldn't recommend erasing flash disks anyway because they have limited rewrite capacity.
Click to expand...

Yes I understand that you are concerned about wear.

I use a single pass random wipe. As flash memory is not magnetic a single pass should be sufficient to wipe the data. Sometimes a user just has to wipe the free space on a flash drive and I would be really pleased if Eraser could be trusted to be able to do this.

As far as I can tell (humble use of hex editor) Eraser 5X does wipe the flash drive properly. As for damaged sectors I don’t know.

Thanks.
 
Dunno =shrug=.

That's all I can say lol
 
From what I understand, write endurance is not as big a deal as it once was because of better dynamic and static wear-leveling algorithms being used and the use of high endurance flash. Just as an example, there are drives from MTRON that claim write endurance greater than 140 years @ 50GB write per day and can be used in an enterprise environment.

So it seems we can erase unused disk space with only one pass and achieve the desired result, but you can't just right click erase a file and expect it to be erased because of the wear-leveling?
 
I would tend to agree - yes. This is the same problem that erasing files on thumbdrives bring.
 
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