it makes you wonder why they want everyone to go over to these ssds crap



A team of researchers from the University of California at San Diego have concluded that it is difficult to "securely" erase data stored on solid state drives (SSDs). For example, ATA and SCSI command set features for securely destroying data on SSDs were available on 8 of the 12 drives tested and only successful on 4.


And while repeatedly overwriting an entire disk with multiple repetitions successfully destroyed data, the SSD Firmware Translation Layer (FTL) made the process more complicated and time-consuming than on traditional hard disk drives.

Report: SSDs "difficult" to securely erasePerhaps not unexpectedly, the process of degaussing SSDs did not erase any of the data or disable access to the drive.

Finally, single file sanitization was found to be nearly impossible on SSDs, while even the most effective file destruction methods left behind more than 4 percent of the original data.

According to Sophos security researcher Chester Wisniewski, encrypted SSDs clearly provide the most practical form of protection.

"Disks can be safely decommissioned by deleting the encryption keys from the Key Storage Area (KSA) and then running a full DoD compliant erasure to ensure the keys are non-recoverable," he explained. 


"To properly secure data and take advantage of the performance benefits that SSDs offer, you should always encrypt the entire disk and do so as soon as the operating system is installed."

However, Wisniewski emphasized that securely erasing SSDs after they have been unencrypted is very difficult, and may actually be "impossible" in some cases.

There are a number of good clear advantages to SSD drives. Speed is the most important one and the reason you should use an SSD for your O/S and APPLICATION drive. Spinners will never compete in this area. It is physically impossible.

I always recommend to have SSD as your base drive. And several big slow spinners for your data storage. There absolutely no reason to be able to have to load your mp3 or jpegs or avi files at SSD speeds. So therefore you can put these on the spinners.

There is every reason to put your O/S on the solids, the amount of disk thrashing, moving the heads back and forth thousands of times to load an application, all those tiny windows files, libraries, drivers, and dll modules, it's just a big bottleneck. One that SSD solves nicely.

As for securely erasing an SSD. An encrypting drive is the best, and will show no loss of performance. Just don't expect data recovery to be easy on this type of drive. But then again, you're the smart user and run regularly scheduled backups. Kill the encryption key, kill the data.

OHH WAIT.. I thought we weren't putting user data on these SSD's ?? So in a proper system, data recovery ops is non-issue, and if you backup your spinners, it's also a non-issue.

Personally, and don't tell anyone, I don't think SSD's are ready for prime-time. Especially when the likes of Kingston advertises 3000 p/e as a major advantage! Give it another 2-3 years and then.. we'll see!

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.