To enable a reasonable and thorough erase procedure, virtually all SSDs support the ATA Secure Erase command or its SAS or NVMe equivalents, allowing a computer to simply instruct the drive to erase itself in whatever manner is appropriate for that drive.
The limited program/erase cycle count of flash memory makes multi-pass overwrite schemes undesirable. A single pass of writing fresh data to the drive could leave 10% of the old data physically intact and accessible to somebody with the right tools.
In general, multiple writes to the same logical block address will not go to the same physical flash memory cells. Solid state drives complicate things due to their use of wear leveling and substantial spare area. In a context with less severe requirements for rendering the data inaccessible, the usual method is to overwrite the entire drive one or more times. If you're decommissioning a computer that was used to handle classified information, you might be required to use an external degaussing coil or simply destroy the drive in question. If you just want to make a clean OS installation to a drive that already contains some data, then wiping the filesystem headers and partition tables will render the drive "empty" as seen by software not intended for data recovery. The rest of the time, it's a specialized standalone gadget for securely erasing and overwriting drives.Įrasing a hard drive can mean any of several things. In one mode, it's a normal USB to SATA drive dock that allows for easy access to bare 2.5" or 3.5" drives. The name is long and a bit confusing, but that's because this device fulfills two mostly separate roles. When first offered up their USB 3.0 Standalone Eraser Dock for review, it took me a little while to really figure what it was for.
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