Why SSD Drives Destroy Court Evidence, and What Can Be Done About It

Honestly, in this day and age and with some of the powers the government has been getting in projects like Stellar Wind, a bit of information impermanence for personal data might not be such a bad thing.

> In general, software secure wipe tools that would overwrite information stored on a hard drive with cryptographically secure random data in several passes. The problem with these software tools is their inability to address and, therefore, access the entire storage capacity of the SSD drive (including system, reserved and remapped areas).

This is a problem with traditional drives too. When a drive marks a sector as bad some software (Darik's boot and nuke is just one example of a respected software) cannot overwrite these sectors.

ATA Secure Erase has been the recommended choice for years now - it's faster than regular over writing, and it gets more of the drive.

If you have to work to a standard (and that's the only reason you'd bother with multiple overwrites) you can do the other overwriting passes later, when you have the time to do so.

Doing nothing about it is a good thing.