Quote:
Originally Posted by knc1
This situation is a major concern in the case of SSD devices, and some manufacturers are beginning to provide SSD devices with a command set that allows the system to be sure that stored data is really, truely "gone".
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I have several older SSD drives that do not have Trim, so I have to periodically do a secure erase when they start writing very slowly (write wear-leveling fragmentation) to restore them back to full factory-fresh write speeds. The newer SSD drives with trim support can do that automagically in erase block increments if supported by the OS (such as Win7).
SSD drives that were formatted using the old XP default "spinning rust" parameters have this little problem where all 4K clusters span across erase block boundaries, compounding the problem. It is a good idea to partition and format them on a Win7 box (which uses 1MB alignment) before installing in a WinXP box. Just FYI.
Of course eMMC devices may also have this partition alignment problem if not done correctly. Has anybody verified that lab126 got the FAT partition alignment right for optimal performance and longevity of the eMMC device?
P.S. Many modern "spinning chrome" drives do some amount of write wear leveling to prevent mechanical wear. In addition, bad blocks can get copied and replaced. In both cases, a copy of sensitive data might get left behind. So the classical old way of overwriting with a series of different data patterns for "NSA software secure erase" is no longer reliable, and for SSD drives also contributes unnecessary and useless additional write wear.
