Secure Delete on Solid State Drives

It is not really needed and it will shorten the SSD's life.

rwsitb wrote:

Does the Secure Delete work properly on Solid State Drives? Have read some older blogs that it does not and could shorten the live of the drive.

You have read correctly.

Kappy wrote:

It is not really needed and it will shorten the SSD's life.

Perhaps you can enlighten me, but does't a basic erase simply remove

and rebuild the directory structure and all the bits still stay set?

Therefor, you would still at least need to write a pass of zeroes to the drive

(being solid state, wouldn't need the multiple writes like an HDD which

in order to remove the residual magnetism) so some recovery program

can't scan the bytes and glean the previous contents?

A basic erase of an entire device resets all the directory bits to zeroes. Since the directory occupies only one extent that is a small part of the device. Secured erasure involves writing numerous passes of random data to the data part of the drive in all sectors. This impacts the entire device. Secure Erase actually writes multiple passes - at least seven. This adds to the number of writes done to the SSD. Since an SSD has a limit to the number of writes in its lifetime, the more you do unnecessarily the expected life declines ever so much.

Now, if you don't make a practice of doing this then the reduction in life is minimal. The SSD will likely last longer than the computer it's in. Now, believe it or not even SSDs have some sort of residual quantum energy from which data can be recovered if you know what to do. This is supposedly the result of the effects of quantum mechanics. If I knew much about Quantum Mechanics perhaps I could explain it to you, but I don't. Sorry.